Words
Reginald Cathcart squirms. His stomach’s disquiet. The past week’s stories have been weak, not up to his usual standards. He can feel the Words’ gurgitation roil. They push against the inside of him. He senses them weave through his intestines, circle his stomach like they’re on a Gravitron ride, snake upward through his esophagus.
He knows what’s coming. He slides to the dining table, quickly unbuttoning and pulling off his shirt. He unbuckles his pants, unzips the fly. He steps out, his legs toothpicks. His boxers hang from his body like a flag on a windless day, and with no hesitation, he pulls them down, as he has every day for the past fifteen years.
And with a gush, the Words erupt from him, spewing from his mouth as an uncontrollable stream of letters, jumbled and mixed like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Physical letters splatter on the dining room table and sparkle like diamonds in the bright shards of morning sunlight. In their splash, between each verbal ejaculation, Reginald can make out the individual letters. They pile up, a thick alphabet soup. They form patterns Reginald has never seen, Z’s with L’s and B’s. It’s as if he’s regurgitated a pallet of Scrabble tiles.
Once it starts, he can’t control it—the Word vomit that spews from his lips. Violent, sick throes rock Reginald. His throat spasms with another hurl. Thin strings of yellowish bile dribble from his mouth and link letter to letter, phoneme to phoneme. He’s soaked as sweat pours down his face like tears. Another hargh and suffixes and prefixes fill the table. There are too many to count, huge piles erupting one after another. The rancid, acidic smell of Words hits his nostrils. He can taste it at the back of his throat, and that taste makes more Words flow out of him in a tsunami of verbiage. After what feels like hours, one last blarch and a few stray vowels expel—there’s always an E at the end and a couple of O’s that ooze out. But most of the letters have settled in front of him, a pile now two inches thick.
Reginald Cathcart wipes the strings of spittle from his lips and the tears from his eyes. His face and back are drenched. The exertion of excretion exhausts him. He surveys the letters, dabs a finger into the wet goop, swirls it around. The letters dance in the sunlight. There must be thousands of them today, thousands upon thousands. An T meets a H and an E, and a perfect THE links in his bilious digestive juices. He slides it to the side. A traditional beginning, but every journey begins with a single step, as they say.
Reginald Cathcart dips back into his effusate. He spreads his hands over the goopy word THE and feels for the next letters. The viscera are cool to the touch, but he knows the proper letters will be warmer than the others; they will tingle under his fingers when he reaches them. He just has to sift, scrutinize, select, and sort. He can do it with his eyes closed.
Time to write.
He plunges his thin body into his effluvium, still tepid and organic. His skin is a prickle of nerves. His mantis-like body rests on top of the foul, wet letters. They shift underneath him, their tickle an errant ant that runs up his arm, over his back, across his stomach, and down his abdomen. He swims through his own acidic effusions, picking letters up and dropping them in patterns. Every inch of his skin feels alive as it vibrates with language. Words spin, letter mating letter like lovers leaping, and join in an orgy of linguistic fortitude as new shapes and contours emerge. He can feel simple, declarative statements combine with longer phrases, and from their union, whole clauses form. His body shakes as clause begats clause and sentence becomes paragraph, each an orgasmic experience he feels through every cell; meaning that hehas created, from his body, that he has always created from his body. Meaning he doesn’t understand until he looks back at the table—sodden, with connotation dripping off his body, the past hour a blur of orgiastic fire—to read the words in situ.
His stomach drops as he reads the story his body expostulated upon the table. After thousands of stories, these words today form only for him. Well, him and one other. One he has only ever heard stories about. The Logoclast.
The Word-eater.
Pearl Jacoby sorts the returns at the front desk of the Haver Hill Community Public Library, ready to distribute them back to the library shelves, from Fiction—A to Nonfiction 999—extraterrestrial worlds. “Busy weekend?” she asks Carla Spackleton, the sixteen-year-old Pearl’s hired on a part-time basis to help manage the library. The teenager’s got one of those modern haircuts, with the back shaved and longer blonde hair flopping over top, and she wears large glasses that Pearl would have called “grandmotherly” back when she was sixteen, but she guesses are in now. Carla is mousey and quiet, introspective and introverted: in other words, the type of teen who, Pearl rightly assumes, would want to work in a library over summer break. Plus, Pearl suspects Carla harbors a desire to be a writer—at lunchtime, she’s seen her scribbling in the break room, taking notes on printed-out pages, and flipping through How to Write Fiction.
“Anything good?” Carla drops the book she’d been scanning, one of those Romantasy books—A Crown of Thistle-Down:Dash of Magick. It’s not Pearl’s chosen meal. She prefers something more substantial: a Vonnegut, a Woolf, a Liu Cixin. Something with meat on its bones.
“Children’s books; some picture, some board. A couple of Patterson. A Stephen King.” They have a stack of his newest bestseller in the front—the man’s a machine, churning out bestsellers like they’re burgers, always good for a tasty feast—and she makes a mental note to cull his shelves. She’s done that with Koontz too, but she prefers a meal, not a snack. She holds the Stephen King in her hand, weighing whether or not to give it to her—she knows it might come across as too meddling, but she also knows that kids sometimes need a push. She finally decides: “Here’s something you might like.” Pearl hands Carla a battered copy of On Writing. “It’s old, but it might be helpful. You know, if you’re into that.”
Pearl studies Carla’s blank expression—which could be read as either stunned affection or surprised outrage, an ambiguity Pearl recognizes from her own teenage years. Nevertheless, Carla picks up the book, studies King’s black-and-white candid on the cover, flips it over to read the back. “Thanks,” she says, still staring at the book. “How’d you know I wanted to be an author?”
“Oh, call it librarian’s intuition,” Pearl says, even as she thinks, you couldn’t have made it any more obvious!
“I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I could read,” Carla replies, then tells Pearl about writing fan fiction of The Vampire Diaries at thirteen. She published it online, got some followers, and has been working on publishing some minor short stories as well.
Pearl shrugs good-naturedly. “Not for me, dear. I prefer to hold books, not screens.” It’s true: she still digests the hard-copy newspaper every morning, and that’s enough for her.
“Yeah, yeah, when I was your age,” Carla says with a not-unkind smile. “I bet you had to walk to school uphill both ways and hold a warm potato for lunch.”
Pearl laughs at this because the thought of eating a potato strikes her as one of the funniest things she’s ever heard. Pearl hasn’t eaten a potato in fifteen years. Pearl hasn’t eaten any food for fifteen years. A few books a week, and she’ll be satiated.
Words give her all the nourishment she needs.
She turns back to the cart of books. Her next meal awaits.
At 4:48 p.m. Pearl Jacoby’s ready to lock up the library. The books are reshelved, the carts are organized for tomorrow, and Carla’s ushering the slowpoke patrons to leave. Pearl spies Mrs. Opaline, the old lady with gray hair, shuffling through the massive front doors to the library and judges the library empty. “Thanks, Carla. I guess we can pack up a few minutes—”
“Is this the Haver Hill Public Library?” A booming voice echoes from the front door. Mrs. Opaline? Pearl thinks, before realizing the voice is both too low and too loud for the ninety-pound octogenarian that makes the library her daily commute. She squints again at the front doors. A tall, squiggly figure comes into focus, looking like a cartoon. The human skeleton shambles toward the desk. His approach blocks a little more of the sunlight with each step until he stands next to them both, his body outlined in sun. The man looms over the two women. He must be six foot seven, but can’t weigh more than one hundred fifty pounds. He reminds Pearl of that movie about the man lost at sea, the one who became friends with a volleyball, but he’s much taller than what’s-his-name. His face has more lines than a Shakespeare play, and his rail-like arms poke out like a child’s stick-figure drawing. Clean-shaven, icy blue eyes, but his body is as raggedy as a toy discarded and left in the dirt. He’s wearing a threadbare trench coat. And that smell—good lord. His skin is rancid; not just unwashed and sweaty, but like a fetid raw onion, spoiled and moldy. The image it brings to her mind is of a sodden, sour container of milk. Pearl gags at the back of her mouth.
Carla seems unfazed by the smell and sight of this spindle-limbed Eldritch man; in fact, if Pearl knows her at all, she thinks she’s in awe of him. “Oh my God,” Carla cries, and thrusts her hand toward the man, palm open. “It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you—I’m a,” she chokes on her gum before swallowing it, “a huge fan, sir. I’ve been reading you my entire life.”
The man grasps Carla’s hand, his shovel-like grip dwarfing hers, and pumps her hand twice before letting go. In a deep voice, he responds, “My dear, the pleasure is all mine.” Then he turns to Pearl. “You are Pearl Jacoby?”
Pearl nods and says, “You’ve found me. And who are you?” He squares his face and somehow, despite the foul odor and strange visage, and ignoring the late-hour intrusion, she finds those blue eyes disarming.
“My name,” he says, his voice booming, “is Reginald Cathcart—”
Carla interrupts. “I can’t believe it. I’ve read all your stories.”
Reginald ignores her. “Pearl Jacoby,” he says again. “I have come because I have been warned of a great evil. And you are called as well. You must come with me!”
“Called? My dear, I think you have the wrong person.”
“You are Pearl Jacoby? The Word-eater?”
Pearl risks a glance at Carla; she doesn’t want her to find out about her weekly book consumption. She’s kept it hidden for fifteen years, and a secret she is determined it shall remain. She needs this man to exit the library posthaste, so she puts on her best dismissive librarian voice. “That’s quite enough of that.”
Reginald’s voice turns haunting, and his eyes blaze as he raises his arms into the air. “Pearl Jacoby. The Words have directed me to you. They named me Logomorph and you the Logoclast,” he says. “And they have directed me to find you. You are called.” His words echo across the marbled library hall. His face glistens with a sheen of sweat. He lowers his arms. There’s a moment of silence as Carla and Pearl stare at Reginald. Finally, after what feels like a full minute but can’t be more than a few seconds, Pearl emits the longest and loudest sigh of her life. With resignation coloring her voice, she says, “Carla. Get the key to the Rare Books Room. We have work to do.”
While Carla’s gone, Pearl risks talking openly to the man. “What do you mean, you are the Logomorph?” Pearl asks. “I’ve heard of you; of course I have, but what the heck are you doing here?”
“It is the term my Words used. You are the Logoclast and I, the Logomorph.”
Pearl quickly scans the terms. “Logo—meaning word, I suppose. And -morph means shaper, so I guess that makes you a word-shaper? And -clast is, what, ender? That’s me?”
“More like, eater,” he replies. “But what do the Words mean, Word-eater? Who are you, Pearl Jacoby?”
She rocks from foot to foot, unable to look him in the eye. She thinks for a moment, then retrieves a children’s book from the counter and holds it to her lips. “Watch.” She spreads the front cover, and the writing disentangles itself from the well-thumbed pages. At first, the words on the page stick, as if some great invisible entity stretched them like a piece of gum on the sidewalk. Then, by some otherworldly breath, they peel off the page like stickers from a sheet and fly to her mouth. One after another, the words pile onto her tongue: the copyright page, complete with edition and year in diminutive serif font; the title page in clear, black Copperplate Bold; the first chapter in curled Garamond.
As the words fly into her, Pearl dorsiflexes the back of her tongue so they spill down her throat. Reginald watches in fascinated horror as Pearl riffles the pages one after another, and entire gobs of text drain in a blur of active verbs, blubbered nouns, juicy adjectives, and conjunctions. As the end of the book approaches, Pearl slows her riffle, and the last few pages snap with a satisfying thump. She drops the empty book into the trash just as Carla turns the corner. “Got it! I had to look in three different spots,” she calls. Pearl lets out a nearly silent burp and glares at Reginald, daring him with her eyes not to talk about what he’d just witnessed.
Carla joins them. “I’m pumped—I’ve never been in the Rare Books room.” Her voice vibrates with youthful energy. She hands Pearl the key, then glances down at the trash. “Something wrong with it?”
Without taking her eyes off Reginald, Pearl answers, “No, dear. Just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Pearl leads the two down a flight of stairs into the library basement. “Probably not what you were expecting,” she says, opening a door. The Rare Books room is well-lit, with a smooth table at one end, an open area in the middle, and shelves of ancient books lining the walls.
“Why are we here?” Reginald asks. “We have to go!”
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I know a book that will help.” Pearl scans the shelves until her eyes alight on a tall, leather-bound green cover with gilt writing across the front.
“A Bible?” Carla asks. Her voice wavers. “Seriously? Is that for real?”
“’Tis not a Bible we need,” Reginald says, weaving his way to Pearl’s side. “And I think you should go as well, child.”
“Excuse me? It’s Carla,” she says, a note of teenage anger rising in her voice. “And I’m not leaving—this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Tell me about this . . . Bible,” Reginald says, ignoring Carla.
“It’s not a Bible. Not precisely.” Pearl lays her splayed hand on the cover. “It’s an Apocrypha. Found in one of the churches built before the founding of Haver Hill. From the 1670s.” She opens the cover; on the inside, a faded drawing of an ornate tree. “You using the term Logomorph. It reminded me of this Apocrypha. Look at this,” she says and points to the words Logoclast written faintly in ornamental calligraphy and Logomorph beside it.
“What is this?” Reginald asks, pointing at the tree. He looms over the two women, a Wicker Man.
“It’s called the Immortal Tree, and it comes from early Christianity,” Pearl says, “from before the English translation. It predates the original tree in the Garden of Eden; it’s more like the Norse Yggdrasil. It appears throughout human history—Assyria, Gilgamesh, Egypt. The ancient Persians called it Gaokerena.”
“What does it mean?” Carla asks. She looks at Pearl, deliberately ignoring Reginald. “Do you know?”
Despite the fact the library is closed and empty, Pearl’s voice quiets. “The Biblical Tree of Life connects Heaven, Hell, and the Earth. It’s about rebirth and renewal. This Immortal Tree is older. It tells us about the birth of Meaning, the way Words and language take on significance. Every Word means something—often more than one thing. That’s why it’s the Immortal Tree—people may die, but Words live on. Listen to this.” She flips a few pages to read the tiny text at the bottom of a page:
“Then God said, ‘I gift you Words, and the Words shall have Meaning, and the Meaning shall nourish your Soul and your Soul shall give ever-light to your creative spirit.’ God separated the Words from the Nullwords, and called the Words ‘Full’ and the Nullwords ‘Empty,’ and then there was Truth in the universe and thus was created peace—the seventh day.”
She closes the book. “That’s from the Apocrypha Book of Genesis.”
Carla leans in. “Excuse me, but what are Nullwords?”
Pearl shrugs. “The Apocrypha doesn’t go into too much detail. It just says that Nullwords destroy Words, as a snake swallows its prey. When one Nullword appears, a truth dies. As far as I can tell, Nullwords and Words are like, well, matter and anti-matter colliding.”
“Destroying everything when they touch,” Carla says, finishing the thought.
“Or maybe they’re more like a vacuum,” Pearl says. “They suck all the Meaning out of Words? It’s hard to tell; the Apocrypha isn’t clear.”
“Poppycock,” Reginald says. “Balderdash. Words do not come from some magic tree. They come from us.”
“Emerge from you, maybe,” Pearl says. “But who makes them?” Reginald shakes his head as if he’s about to argue, but she interrupts. “And it’s not just Words.” She moves her finger up the page until it rests over a black smudge.
“Looks like someone tried to cross this out,” Carla says.
“I don’t think it’s covering something. I think it’s the thing itself. The Apocrypha calls this mark the Aseme. I think a modern translation is the Anti-Word? A demon that devours all Meaning.” She traces the creature until her finger reaches the edges of the tree. The ink has faded, and it’s almost impossible to read. “The creature comes from the book of Null. It comes from within but devours the Immortal Tree, the tree of Words. You see, the Tree isn’t just a representation. It’s a warning.”
“Finally, something we agree on.” Reginald paces to the door. “Thank you for the theology lesson, but the creature is out there. We have to go. Now!”
“My point,” she says, glaring at Reginald, “is that your Words and my Apocrypha are related. But until now, I haven’t figured out what this meant.” She holds the book out to Reginald and points again at the word Logoclast. Then her finger moves across the page to the word. “See, just as your Words told you, so did my Apocrypha. I hadn’t known of you, and you didn’t know of me.”
“Why is this word written differently?” Carla asks. Whereas Logoclast has beautiful ornamentation around it, Logomorphlooks barren. The lines are crooked, unhinged. “There’s something evil about the way that looks,” she says. Her voice is short. “It’s scary. And rude.” She glares at Reginald.
“Exactly,” Pearl says. “I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.” She moves from Logoclast to Logomorph to the Asemeand back again, her fingers stroking an equilateral triangle across the page. “I think the Apocrypha is warning us against the Logomorph, the word-shaper.”
“Ridiculous,” Reginald says. He crosses his arms and backs closer to the door.
“You produce Words, do you not? As does the Aseme. Produces those Nullwords? Why do you trust your message from…from God or whatever, and not mine?”
“God is not involved!” Reginald shouts. “This is not God’s doing.”
She’s surprised at his vehemence. “Then who?” she asks, and it’s a challenge he can’t back down from.
“I can feel them,” he says, “bubbling and boiling inside of me. I know they come from me because, when they splash onto the table, I can see them all. Each letter forms a word, each word a sentence, each sentence a story. Somehow, they exist within me until they burst from me. The Words are not divine. They cannot be! Why taint this act by claiming something else, something foreign, has given it to me? No, the Words must be a completely natural, human process. Why would I belittle my own creativity with this Elysian nonsense?”
Pearl quiets at this, and he wonders if she’s gone too far. But then she steels herself. Her voice is a whisper. “Who else could it be but God, delivering His Words to you? Perhaps this is how you have a notion of what the Words might mean—they are part of you because they were put there for you. You are merely His vessel.”
Carla looks from one to the other, shaking her head. “No, I think you’re both reading too much into all this.”
“It is impossible to read too much into Meaning,” Reginald says. “The Meaning is there whether or not I placed it there. Meaning is not created by me, nor is it created by you. It lies in the coming together of the two.”
“It’s the magic of consubstantiation,” Pearl says. “The deity in the everyday.”
“No,” Reginald says, shaking his head. “Magic, religion—it is none of these. This Meaning of which I speak is the infinite joy of human connection, the ephemeral link between two minds made whole not by some outside influence, not by a fanciful being we cannot hope to understand, but rather by the unbreakable bond of imagination. A truly human concept that one day I hope you will understand. If I am a vessel, then what about yourself? Why would your God create a Word-shaper and a Word-eater at the same time?”
“I want to believe that for you. I do. For fifteen years, I have been devouring these Words.”
“And fifteen years ago, I erupted Words for the first time.”
They stare at each other, each realizing the truth of the past, but neither one wanting to voice it. That fifteen years ago, they simultaneously became the Word-eater and the Word-creator.
The silence overwhelms the small room before Carla speaks. “Wait. Are you saying that you both received these, um, gifts, or whatever, at the same time? I don’t understand; how did this old book get written, then?” Pearl nods and holds the Apocrypha out.
“Perhaps there were devourers and creators of Words before us,” Reginald suggests.
“Yes, and perhaps the Aseme returns, time and time again,” Pearl continues.
“Just like a tree losing its leaves. They regrow next season. Maybe it’s the same with you two?” Carla says. “It’s an endless cycle.” She points to an ouroboros symbol at the top of the page. “Maybe that’s what this means.”
Pearl flips back through the book to a page bookmarked. She runs her fingers down the small text and reads, “And whence the Logomorph and Logoclast are together, and from within, the Demon of Aseme emerges, so too will the danger be unleashed, and only with consubstantiation will the two defeat the Demon of Anti-Word.”
“Okay, so what does from within mean?” Carla asks, staring at Reginald with suspicion. “From within what?” He’d already shown himself to be less than the idol she’d anticipated. Why would she trust him now?
“And how will we know when it’s here?” Pearl asks. She, too, eyes Reginald. Logomorph, Aseme—perhaps the two are more connected than she thought. She’s struck by anxiety. This strange, lanky man, someone she’s never met before and yet has trapped herself in a room with, just because he knew about her book-eating proclivities? How could she have been that idiotic?
Reginald says, “I imagine we will know it when it arrives.”
Pearl smiles. “I think we need to prepare ourselves,” she says, just as, standing away from them both, Carla explodes in an eruption of blood.
A warm mass of liquid coats Pearl in a blast of blood and brain. The echo of Carla’s eruption resonates in her ears; she’s not sure if the sound is out there in the world, or if she’s just reliving it inside her mind. Standing across the room from her, the open cavity of Carla, her sixteen-year-old library intern, pulsates. Spurts of warm, crimson blood continue to pulse out of her body, but amidst the liquid, Pearl sees—it can’t be—tiny shapes and symbols swimming in the blood. They look like letters, but not any Pearl recognizes. No, these seem like symbols from some inhuman, Eldritch language. Pearl wipes the thick fluid from her face, and the strange symbols fall to the floor. They look like an alien alphabet soup.
Trying to make sense of the senseless, Pearl runs through it in her head: fifteen years ago, Reginald got his Words, she got her hunger, and somehow God just couldn’t let well enough alone and had to create a third: an antagonist, a nemesis. The story in the Apocrypha comes true. But why Carla? The Aseme must have developed in her, directed her since she’d been a babe. How could God have done this? Carla was innocent. A child. She hadn’t deserved to die.
Reginald is also covered in gore and letters, although he got hit by more of Carla’s organs, and there are large chunks of ruby-colored entrails wrapping his body. Smothered by an octopus, she thinks—funny where the mind goes when faced with something so unexpected there can’t possibly be any Meaning to it. It’s literal nonsense, written in blood.
Reginald pulls his hand over his face to try to wipe it dry, but he only succeeds in smearing it across his cheeks and forehead. Small finger streaks draw parallel lines down the sides of his face. “From within,” he says under his breath.
On the floor, Carla’s skull grins at Reginald and Pearl, a weird, manic grimace, and then, slowly, the mouth opens. Pearl spies movement from between the straight, white teeth that used to belong to the girl who wanted to be an author.
A dark cloud wafts out.
It’s no bigger than a mouse, except mouse is the last word Pearl would use to describe it. It’s black. No, not quite black—it’s empty. It’s the opposite of color, the absence of light. At first, Pearl thinks it looks like a starfish, but that’s just the cloud squeezing between Carla’s teeth. Then the arms compress and enjoin within the body, and it elongates into snake-like wisps, like a trail of fat, black smoke from a devoted smoker. The Aseme, Pearl realizes, but just as she’s about to yell it to Reginald, the cloud’s fake lips part, and somehow sounds emerge from it. They’re not Words, at least not yet: the series of croaks and groans sound as if a car was starting. As if the smoke-creature is finding its voice. Then: a strange, almost throat-clearing cough, and Nullwords emerge.
“Xkantkc!” The Nullword from the black cloud that lived in Carla hits Reginald with the force of a bullet. He can feel Meaning being stripped from his body, from wherever it is that the Words themselves come from. Part of his heart rips.
“It’s the Aseme!” Pearl yells, but the words sound faint. Reginald backs away from the shell of Carla. “It must have been living inside of her!”
“Nttolleek! Bzlquk! Phalnmp!”
“What the hell is that sound?” Reginald asks, hands around his ears, but he can’t block it: the Nullwords aren’t auditory. They resonate around him, like they haven’t been spoken so much as brought into existence.
“They’re the nothing Words, the Words empty of Meaning!” Pearl shouts.
“I’ll try to counter. Block me.” Pearl stands in front of him as he heaves his gullet. His body wracks and lurches. He forces a gag, and at the back of his throat, he can feel a letter or two start to appear. But it’s not enough; he’s too weak, and the vomit simply doesn’t occur. He spits, and a G and a L land at his feet.
“I can’t,” he says in between breaths. “I can’t do it.”
“Glidth!” the Aseme counters, using the two letters against him. The smoke hovers in the air above Reginald.
Reginald falls to his knees. “Please, Pearl, please.”
“Glandk! Gluxxer! Glosstic!”
Reginald’s energy drains. His legs collapse on the floor. He gasps for air. He spits. Another letter falls out of his mouth, a lowercase f. A final futile finish, he thinks, as the world turns black.
Pearl exhales, positions her feet shoulder-width apart, and opens her arms like she’s about to embrace the Aseme.
It doesn’t so much turn as flip inside out. The face that had been hurling Nullwords at Reginald appears in the smoke opposite her. It opens its mouth, eyes as blank as death, and speaks. Each nonsense word the Aseme spews, Pearl catches and swallows.
The first few Nullwords hurt going down, as if she’d read Joyce, Lear, or Carroll. Dense prose, leafy, lots of fibrous nouns and slow-acting verbs. She can feel them as they crawl down her throat. Words like poppysmic and weggebobble she’s tasted before, but the first time through, they were saintly, almost divine. Now they taste like dirt. No, worse than dirt—they taste like the absence of taste, like they make other words lose flavor as well. Soon she’d forget the sweetness of cellar door, the acquired taste of moist, the beauty of mellifluous, or the sensuousness of susurrus. All the beauty and love in the world contained in letters and sounds. Once this is done—if she survives it, that is—she’ll have to retrain herself to taste again.
All this, as ideate plunges past her gullet, ruining her appetite.
The Aseme is relentless; and even though she’s swallowing the Nullwords, the Aseme hurls them faster. They splash in her stomach as her digestive system overloads. She has to end this. She can’t handle much more of all this nonsense. The Nullwords are beginning to mirror real ones now, and create a sense of reality out of twaddle:
Regargitate! Efferverence! Splange!
She swallows each one, but she’s slowing down. She can feel herself beginning to fall. The verbiage overwhelms, and she doesn’t have the capacity to absorb more of its gibberish.
With a hertigree she falls to her knees.
After a nostensin she closes her mouth, unable to take any more.
She’s hit with a ratronichal and an omulent, and then she feels no more, and dark fades over her vision.
With the Aseme distracted in its battle with Pearl, Reginald shakes himself conscious. The onslaught of Nullwords was brutal, but nothing compared to the copious number of Words he discards each day from his body. The Aseme doesn’t own a patent on meaninglessness. Reginald’s a writer. He’s been building up an immunity to nonsense since he first put pen to paper.
He slides under the table against the far wall. Sweat dots his forehead, his armpits, his back, and sides. It slides down his skin. From under the table, Reginald pulls his arms out of his sleeves, yanks the shirt up and off his body. His pants are next. Awkwardly, he unbuckles the belt, undoes the button and zipper, and slides out of them as he toes the back of each shoe off too. His socks are easy—one finger in each tube, flicking them to the side like discarded banana peels. He emerges from the table and puts each of his thumbs underneath the elastic waistband of his boxers and drops them as well. One foot up and over, the next as well.
It’s only a few steps, and then he’s behind the Aseme. He spreads his bare stick legs wide. The air conditioning strums his body hair up and down his back, his buttocks, his legs. He heaves, his diaphragm undulating in spasms, and a kerning bubbles beneath his surface.
The Aseme turns to see him now, and even though the smoke face seems expressionless, fear manifests in the way it jerks back at Reginald’s appearance.
Reginald erupts. Letters burst forth from his mouth in a frothy bath. They pour out of him in uncontrollable waves, a stream of mucous verbiage. His body shakes with the effort. As they flow, he reaches out to morph them. He’s never written on the fly before, but the letters come together midair. A BE snaps to a GO and a NE to form BEGONE, which smacks the Aseme across the smoky face.
And the letters that miss the Aseme land on Pearl, nourishing her. Reginald pushes harder to get every drop out of his gullet. He catches Pearl’s eye, redoubles his effort to aid her in the devouring of the Aseme. Sweat drips down his face, stings his eyes, gets caught in the flow of letters from his mouth. Pearl shakily stands and opens her mouth to catch the stream of words flying from Reginald. There is so much Meaning in Reginald’s spew that energy returns to Pearl. She’s not just swallowing the letters—she’s fighting back. Reginald’s watery Word-vomit soaks her as she turns to gobble the Aseme’s Nullwords like candy. She’s doing more than just destroying the Nullwords; she’s changing them, turning them into Meaning after all. Entire new Words become created through her lexigraphic filtration system, and they push back against the Aseme.
The Aseme withers, unable to handle that most impossible of companions: creation and imagination. It must change tactics. Quickly, acting on instinct, the Aseme ceases generating Nullwords. The flood of Meaning-draining slows. It can feel itself churn a new weapon, a type of expression it’s never experienced before: Nullwords about Nullwords. These bulbous Meta-Nullwords float in the air like balloons; they aren’t fast, nor are they direct, but their power is immense. They take great power to create, and only two emerge from the Aseme’s ephemeral body.
Reginald sees one bulbous cloud slalom toward him, and Pearl, too, spies another Meta-Nullword approach. Reginald’s word vomit slows; Pearl’s consumption fades away. Neither expects the deluge of Anti-Meaning that hits them simultaneously.
The attack is fierce and instantaneous. At the approach of the Meta-Nullword, Reginald feels his very sense of self being ripped from him. Whole memories leave his mind, as if a great vacuum sucks him dry. The feeling is one of immense grief, and whole parts of him shrivel and die. His life is a drought. The Meta-Nullwords work at a subconscious level, stripping away parts of him—not just his language, but his history of contemplation, his personality, the components of himself that make him who he is. He falls to his knees and can barely feel the hard concrete smack against his shins. The essence that makes Reginald Reginald dissipates like dew under the sun.
Across the room, Pearl is also hit by the Meta-Nullword attack. For her, the assault takes the form of faith-stealing. Her belief in a higher power—a beneficent God that oversees and communicates, that loves unconditionally, that grants her the power to understand the universe—is extracted from her like a surgeon stealing an organ. She can feel the escape of serenity, the disappearance of certainty. She’s relied on her faith so much during her life; whole slabs of her are being peeled apart. But what’s worse: the emptiness that remains grows larger and uglier, and from within it, she can see the glowing eyes of doubt and disbelief.
Pearl spins, her dreams disappearing from her mind, her personality following. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the Apocrypha. She catches Reginald’s gaze, and he nods. She forces herself to move through the pain, to inch closer to the book until she collapses around it and opens to the first page. The wrenching in her body tears her apart. The text stares back at her. She opens her mouth but then closes it again. She can’t do it. Not the Words of God.
Words seem to enter her head, and she glances toward Reginald—he’s spinning some of the spare letters that have landed on the ground and shooting them in her direction. They splatter, and she senses their Meaning. Do it, the Words say. Eat.
She closes her eyes as a tear falls. Then she opens her mouth again and devours the Apocrypha. Beautiful, calligraphic Words emerge from the book and stream into her mouth. The Words of God taste so good, and for the first time in her life, she knows the truth of ambrosia. They fill her, for each Word in the Apocrypha has Meaning beyond mere human Words.
She feels her strength return. The Words flow through her body again. She is nourished. In the artificial light, the Aseme doesn’t look dangerous anymore. It looks pathetic. And she turns to face the Aseme, opens her mouth, and swallows it whole. Smoke dissipates. It withers in wafting wisps. And with a tiny, almost inaudible sizzle, the Aseme dissipates.
The battle is over so quickly it’s hard to comprehend.
Reginald’s stomach rends, his esophagus burns, his mouth is sore and razed. He imagines Pearl’s feeling similarly. They fall to the ground, exhausted. “It is done,” Reginald says. His voice sounds almost impossibly far away.
Pearl leans against him, her back and sides wet from sweat, from Reginald’s effusion, from the remains of Carla. She’s exhausted but feels satiated for the first time in fifteen years. After a moment, she says, “This was it, huh? The death of Meaning? It looks so ordinary.” She picks up the Apocrypha, its pages now as empty as her heart.
“Perhaps you could use it to journal,” Reginald says after a pause.
She laughs ruefully at this, passing the book to him. “That’s more up your alley, I think.”
“No,” Reginald replies, his voice serious. “I think I’m done with all that now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Aseme. It was too strong. I believe—I mean, I know—that was the last of me.” He gestures to the piles of weak letters and thin bile he produced. “I can feel it, Pearl. I’m done. I’ve lost the ability to produce Words.”
Pearl opens her mouth to respond, to offer some sort of sympathy, and realizes she tastes nothing. “My palate is ruined,” she says at the moment she understands the truth. “I’ll never taste Meaning again.”
“Look at us,” he says. “Logoclast and the Logomorph no more.”
“Have we defeated it? For good, I mean?”
Reginald takes the empty Apocrypha from her hands and flips through the pages, all of them blank now. “I wish I knew. But this symbol—” he points to the ouroboros on the cover—“I think it might come back.”
“Then there may probably be another Word-eater,” she says, “and another Word-shaper.”
“I just hope they’re up to the task.”
The two of them sit back to back, feeling each other breathe, for what feels like hours. A warmth crawls over Reginald’s nude body, and Pearl lays her head on his shoulder.
“Carla didn’t know,” Reginald says after a time. “I imagine it was as much a surprise for her as it was for us.”
“Would she have felt anything?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why her, do you think?” Pearl asks, shifting to look at him. “It must’ve chosen someone close to us for a reason.”
Reginald exhales slowly. “Close enough to try to kill us when we came together.”
“The Apocrypha,” Pearl says. “It made it seem as though the three of us were connected. You and I, we both got our powers fifteen years ago—has the Aseme been in Carla that whole time?”
“Undoubtedly. Look at what Meaning, true Meaning, did to it: it hid in the only place it could. A child for whom imagination was infinite. The Aseme thrived on nonsense, Meaninglessness. She said she wanted to be an author.” Reginald shrugs. “It’s what we do.”
“No, I can’t believe it. I don’t want her to be gone,” Pearl says. “It’s not fair. She had nothing to do with this.”
“It was always going to be someone, Pearl. She was probably drawn to you. To both of us. It was inevitable.” Reginald weighs the empty Apocrypha. “I should have been better with her. I was too distracted by the Aseme, but I didn’t mean to insult her. I have to live with that.”
“I think she knew,” Pearl says.
“You should write her life,” he says, patting the blank book. “Create it anew, in Words and letters that give her life Meaning, Pearl. I’m done writing now; perhaps it’s your turn.”
She holds the book between her hands. “How do I? How can I?”
“You start the way all of us do.” He closes the book in her hand and pats the cover. “One Word at a time.”
“We never agreed on where they came from,” she says after a moment. “The Words, I mean. God or man? Divine intervention or profane humanism?”
He considers, then responds, “Does it matter?” He shakes his head. “Perhaps the Words lie in the space between God and man, the lacuna between divine and profane. Perhaps the Words themselves are what give all of this”—he gestures around them—“Meaning.”
“We are such stuff as Words are made on?”
“The human in the divine?”
“Divinity in humanity.” She points to the space where the Aseme used to be, then drops her hand. The two don’t speak for a long time. Their skin dries and their legs ache from sitting too long. Their hands clasp the whole time. Then they stand, climb the stairs, exit the Rare Books room, leave the library, and walk together into the cool night.
—Hidden in the remains of Carla, a small pool of blood jiggles as they leave. Two symbols—strange letters from some alien language—move closer to each other in the dark, empty room. The breeze from the air conditioning pushes one closer to the other until, with an inaudible click, they slide into place. The two symbols, separated, are Meaningless. But when put in concert with each other, a minute cloud of black smoke waivers between them, like the butt of a dead, smoking cigarette.
The smoke begins to rise—
About the Author
Paul Booth is a speculative fiction author and academic living near Chicago. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee. You can find more at paulboothauthor.com.