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.