(suggested listening: Burn the Witch by Radiohead)
Azazel
The night before, she vomits.
The relief of holiday break and the subdued joy of another too-quiet Christmas gives way to nerves and nausea by December 26th. Tension growing day by day, hour by hour, a rising tide.
By January 2nd, the back to school anxiety has her stomach rumbling, a migraine pressing her eyes out of her skull. She makes it until her father snores in his half-cold bed, then that rising tide bursts up and out and homecooked dinner comes slurrying up in a red-brown wave.
Her sinuses clog. Her eyes water, and part of her can't stop laughing at the idea that these are the first tears she's produced in months. The bloodshot, clammy creature in the mirror reaches over and turns out the light so she doesn't have to look at the herself. The sight would make her sick again.
There is no catharsis, no relief accompanying this release of pressure. She goes to bed stiff as a board, with an empty stomach still churning acid.
XXX
The first day back is quietly miserable. But it is a collective misery. Someone has flooded every bathroom on the east side of the building, all three floors and the locker rooms, and the usual musty hallway scent has given way to damp mildew and shit.
A few of her usual tormentors are present, swearing under their breath as they skirt puddles on the floor and hold their noses, but only in passing. She manages to lose herself in the pilgrimage of grousing travelers making their way to the remaining bathrooms, and everyone is too busy being pissed off at what a dump Winslow is to pay her any attention.
The tiny, fragmented hope from before the holidays rekindles. They ignored her for almost all December, and now this. Maybe they've finally tired of her. It buoys her just enough to make the first half of the day bearable.
It's only as third period ends and lunch begins that she realizes the real conundrum: the bathrooms she usually haunts are still flooded swamps of toilet paper, and the remainder have theme park-length lines.
It's too cold to eat outside on a bench. The snow has come, and the cracked windows and propped open doors in the corridors meant to vent the sewer stink are letting in bitingly frigid air.
She looks between those doors and the lunch room. Warm, but crowded, the masses inside surprisingly happy as they reconnect after the break. Some measure of good cheer seems to have lingered from Christmas. It would be easy to get lost in those crowds again. Eat her lunch and move on.
She slips out the door and sits on the bench anyway. The metal chills through her pants, and her eyes ache as the jelly inside threatens to freeze.
Her lunch tastes funny. Like the tuna sandwich has turned. Probably a consequence of breathing in noxious fumes all day and then flash-freezing her sinuses shut in the cold. That seemed like a thing that could happen.
Her bottled water is worse, and it's only after she downs half of it that she thinks to wonder if the cap was sealed. Had it made the characteristic plastic snap as she turned it? The taste is off. Like the year they'd all gone on vacation to Michigan and Emma had steadfastly refused to drink the sulfurous, Great Lakes water. Is there an odd, oily sheen to the remaining water, or is she imagining it? A chunk of bread from backwash floats there, shedding particulate crumbs like sawdust. She eyes it.
Her stomach lurches. She pours the water out.
It's turned to ice before she stands up.
Had she let her bag out of her sight? Had they tampered with it? They weren't usually that clever. Not so subtle. There hadn't been any of the snickers, the knowing smiles as they waited for her to see what they'd done.
She stops. Brushes crumbs from her shirt.
If she keeps thinking about it, she's going to throw up again.
The thought of having to puke in one of the mobbed, over-stressed bathrooms is enough to quell any possibility. Vomiting in the halls would be less public.
She goes back inside.
XXX
Her mother is- was allergic to mushrooms. Once, when Taylor was young, she'd eaten a slice of the wrong type of pizza at a work party and gotten so sick they'd had to leave. It wasn't fatal or dangerous for her, just miserable.
When she'd asked her mother what it felt like, she'd described it like a shiver.
A full-body shiver, a crawling in the throat and skin as the immune response kicked into gear to say something was wrong. She'd known within thirty seconds of taking that first bite. After the shiver came pain, a stabbing throb in the lower back as her kidneys went into overdrive.
Taylor had thought about her mother getting very sick a lot as a kid. What-ifs. What if her mother got sick and had to go to the hospital? What if Taylor was allergic to anything?
They'd never gotten her tested.
She doesn't think she is.
But her heart starts beating ten minutes into Algebra. Not frantically. Just rising up from that barely felt, hardly noticed sensation in the back of the mind to a steady throb that sends her palms sweating and vibrates the nerves in her teeth.
She swallows drool and wipes her hands on her jeans.
No one looks at her.
Her face is hot. A blush, like she's snuck one too many sips of wine at the Barnes' Christmas Party. The capillaries opening up, blood spreading.
Mr. Gladly finishes his spiel on Cold War Europe and begins talking about their homework. Someone walks by in the hallway and rattles the door in its frame. The rattling continues even after the person is gone, the door jangling merrily.
No one looks at her as she sweats and salivates and her nerves tighten into steel coils beneath her skin.
No one looks. She watches them. Out of the corners of her eyes, surveying the room for anyone watching her back. Anyone knowingly looking. Laughing at her behind their lips.
She looks and looks, and only when she looks back at the front of the room does she realize Gladly isn't there at all. It's Mr. Quinlan. Talking in Gladly's unctuous voice.
She blinks, and her eyelids feel gummy. It's too hard to concentrate when her heartbeat is vibrating her skull.
She shakes her head, and the fog clears a bit. Quinlan-Gladly becomes just Quinlan again.
It was the water. It had to have been the water.
She needs. She needs to go home.
XXX
Her path out of the school is a straight shot. Down the hall from Quinlan's classroom, down the stairs, down the path, down the downstairs hallway, down the down the – the hallway. Down the hallway. Out the side door. Down the hallway and out the door.
Down the hallway from Quinlan's and-
Past her locker.
The fecal scent of the bathrooms has receded somewhat, but there's something in the air as she leaves Quinlan's on legs that are too long and too short. She can't stop swallowing, sucking her lips in for fear of slivers of spit escaping the corners of her mouth, showing everyone else that she's coming apart. If they see that they'll see her eyes bugging out of her skull, her hair electrifying, coming alive at the roots and-
She shakes her head.
The hallway telescopes a bit, but she walks into it.
The stink grows.
Something rotten. Iron.
A crash and she jumps, a yelp bursting past her clenched lips. A boy has slammed a fist into his locker door. Is it stuck? It must be a stuck door. No one noticed her though.
He hammers his fist against it as she stilts away, the banging following down the corridor.
Into the scent.
Has something died in the second floor bathroom?
Someone?
Her locker bloc approaches, sliding down the wall as she stands still – head shake. No. She walks toward it.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Hand on metal.
A second set of fists joins it. A third. A- a many more hands join in. The drumming of hands follows her as she comes parallel with her locker.
The door is open.
Painted nails dance and tap against it. Emmadisophia smiles at her, faces bleeding into one another.
She stops. The locker moves toward her. It's in her path. It is full of filth. It is- it is- everything terrible is inside that metal box.
Hands catch her shoulders and tug her backpack away. She lets it go with boneless arms.
The drumming of hands matches her heartbeat. Rattles her bones.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
She tries to say something to Emma, swallows drool and pushes the words forth, but what comes out is only an anemic burp, then half a sob.
The hands push. The locker pulls.
She goes in.
XXX
They keep drumming as the door shuts. And then drum some more.
Her hands join the beat on the inside of the door.
It is hot and humid, and there is no boundary between where her skin begins and the insects end and the filth begins and the rot never ends.
She can't start screaming because she hasn't stopped screaming yet.
XXX
They don't pull her out until she stops sobbing.
The door opens and cool, blessedly cool air finds her stagnant skin. Fills her empty lungs. Hands a hundred hands find her and drag her forth, limbs unfolding from a bloody cocoon and trailing a raiment of filth behind her.
Something damp and cold touches her brow, and she jerks and cracks a ruined hand against the doorframe. Her eyes open.
Emma daubs her with a damp rag once more.
She wears white. It's a gown from a photo in the Barnes' living room. Emma wears her mother's wedding dress and smiles serene and calm and beautiful and not even the way her outline melts into the background, the lace pattern of her dress spreading across her skin like ivy can detract from it.
You did so well. Come on now. Just a bit more.
The hands raise her up, and Julia leads a donkey a jackal a lamb a- a- head shake. Julia leads a donkey on a tether. The hands place Taylor atop it, and Julia directs them forth.
The hallway is transfigured, the fluorescents broken and darkened, the windows open, candles lining the path ahead.
Everyone is there. Everyone and all them. A mass of masses and faces and always the hands not drumming now, but pointing, clapping, drawing signs in the air.
They applaud her as the donkey clops its way through the corridor.
How a donkey descends stairs, she misses. The world smears and spins, her own perspective unable to decide on a spot behind her eyes, exchanging near and far, watching some scenes at a great distance.
She thinks she laughs at the Donkey Descending the Stairs, c. 2011, oil painting. Or perhaps that's another trick of perspective, the colors flattening and distorting, turning the crowds following her, the procession into a tableau.
There is a procession, that is surety. The whole school following her. There's a marching band. The trumpets and deep bass drums and the rattling snare form a cheery march as they set the time for her marche au supplice.
The hallway walls open and fall away and she finds herself in the dim tile tunnel to the school pool. It's in the basement. Subterranean. Chlorinated enough to burn the nostrils, and the tiles keep swapping places with each other in the walls.
The school chorus, though there aren't many of them, start in. She didn't think Winslow had a school song, but they sing one now. And the crowd joins in. A hundred thousand voices echoing in the tunnel, singing as one, never missing a beat, the donkey joins in Taylor joins in everyone joins in.
She's slurring, choking on her spit, on the blood from a face smashed against the locker walls and lips chewed like some novocained idiot, but she's slurring along with the song and-
and
Why?
She shakes her head.
No. This is- this is not right.
Everything hurts. She hates them. Hates this place. Hates this spectacle. This can't be right can't be real. If she could just think for a moment and-
The doors draw back like theater curtains.
The crowd rings the school pool. Faded banners hang from the rafters, emblazoned with the names of the few passable swimmers the school has managed to produce, now painted over with new names done in neon poster paint.
The banners now read: T. Hebet. T. Herbert. T. Hebeart.
That isn't right. Her name is- is is is…
Taylor, Emma says. Her gloved hand brushes clotted hair from T. Hebet's face.
It's time.
There are rings to the pool crowd. Concentric circles in this new solar system.
The outer-most are boys. Young men in their finest red and green and red and black and black and blue, their eyes lovingly blindfolded with ribbon, their bodies turned away, never to see this. Hands clasped at their backs, never to be lifted.
Only one boy faces inward. Heads shorter than the men at his left and right, weak chin quivering. What's his name? Greg… Vebert? Close enough. The laugh that comes at this thought is faltering.
A thought breaks through the haze. Draws her back up to the surface.
Greg is the Witness. He watches and sees and ogles and spectates and voyeurs, and with his mouth stuffed full of garlic and ashes, he says nothing.
The next ring is girls. In their Sunday finest, elbows linked, faces painted and smeared and cakes with crimson lipstick at eye, ear, and mouth, their hair cut short and jagged and it's her finest feature, they've ruined her hair, haven't they?
They look at her as one and smile. And she hates them dearly. For doing this to her. For being everything that she is not. For being happy when she is not.
The haze clears a bit further. She shakes her head, clotted hair slapping her cheeks. Why is any of this happening? She tries to tug the donkey to a halt, but Julia tuts and leads it to the final ring.
Winslow's faculty stand at the very edge of the pool. They wear only flower crowns, and their nudity is somehow less upsetting than these dainty coronets of hyssop and stargazer lily.
She tries to speak, and finds she's bitten through her tongue at some point, and the words come as a gurgle.
The donkey halts at the poolside.
Hands tug her down from the mount, and she lands in a puddle, filth bleeding off her feet to Rorschach along the pool deck. Principal Blackwell, body painted and runed with India ink and dry erase marker, meets her there.
Thank you for coming, she says. Peace be with you.
And also with you, the crowd speaks as one.
Taylor finds a word of her own. Finally. Why?
Blackwell motions to the crowd. To the school around them. There needs to be an outlet. A way to release the tension. A scapegoat for all the many wrongs done here. And you were right here waiting. We just had to tear up your transfer slips, turn a blind eye. Barely anything at all. It was enough to give Miss Barnes free-rein.
She draws back. Finally finds her footing and regains function in her legs. Turns to run.
The many hands find her first. Rope slithers and tightens around her wrists and ankles. It is simultaneously slick and itchy, and upon second glance is multicolored braids, black and brown and and and blonde and she knows where the girls' locks have gone.
They've made themselves ropes.
The noose that goes round her throat is mostly red hair.
Blackwell pats her cheek. Now now, Miss Herbert. This is a once in a lifetime career opportunity.
I didn't choose this, she shouts back.
You didn't choose anything until now, so why would this be any different? She smiles, lips inked black stretching wide. Did you have agency in any of the suffering wrought on you? Did you choose to live these mistakes? Of course not. You were the perfect, passive little hatesink. Your suffering is for us.
I don't understand. She's started crying at some point. Sheer frustration at her own stupidity overruling fear. She'd never understood any of it. Any of them.
Blackwell pats her cheek again and pushes her on.
There are steps into the pool.
Madison stands at the first. She wears a doe mask, and holds a candle in her hands. Her gown is pale green, the color of new spring.
If it wasn't you, it was me, she says, and her smile can barely be called that. Thank you.
She snuffs the candle and presses a kiss to Taylor's cheek. Comes away with muck on her lips.
The hands drag Taylor to the first step. Cold water covers her ankles.
Sophia stands at the second step. She wears a panther mask, and carries a bundle of arrows bound with incongruous pink ribbon. Her gown is black, funerary.
It was never personal, she says, and for once doesn't sound bored with Taylor. You get to be a hero, get to do some good for the world. It was more than you would have done if left alone.
She snaps the arrows over her knee and tugs Taylor's head down. Her breath against her forehead, the kiss there firm. Sophia licks the blood from her lips.
The next step down. Water rises above her knee. Her jeans are soaking it in.
Emma stands on the final step, still in her mother's wedding gown. She wears no mask, and perhaps that is its own mask. She carries a flute.
It hurt me to hurt you, she says. She leans in for the kiss, and Taylor spits in her face.
Fuck you.
Emma smiles sadly and blows a reedy note on a flute that is not hers.
A forced, final step down.
Water to her waist, filth leaking off her.
Blackwell steps to the edge of the pool and raises a silver dagger in one hand.
To the dawn of the new year, she intones, and slashes her palm. Three drops of blood fall into the pool.
As one, the faculty repeat the act. Their blood joins hers. They step back, opening ranks for the girls. They shed no blood, only point to Taylor, and she realizes that the blood they've soaked-marinated-bathed her in was theirs to begin with.
The boys shed blood clumsily, without looking.
The pool is turning a watery crimson, a school's worth of blood coloring it drop by drop.
Take on our burdens, Blackwell calls.
And bear our sins, the crowd replies.
Sophia murmurs something behind her, and then tugs the ropes tight around Taylor's limbs. The final tie is around her knees. A hobble.
Emma's hand alights upon her shoulder, and then squeezes it. Just once.
Goodbye, she whispers.
Emma pushes.
The last thing she sees before she goes in is her mother, standing waist-high in the sea of red. She wears an owl mask and holds out a hand.
She is bound hand and foot. Weighed down with the entire school's sins, heavier than lead.
She flails.
Struggles.
Screams a stream of bubbles.
Distorted faces look through the water's surface.
They like this.
They catalog every second of her pain.
And just as she thinks to stand up – she's in the shallow end – Emma steps into the pool with her.
Her sister's hands hold her under the water.
Taylor stops struggling.
XXX
Well, this is weird and self-indulgent, and was spawned in its entirety by a random comment on reddit about Taylor being the scapegoat for Winslow. I took that to its illogical conclusion and basically ripped off Wicker Man while I was at it.
I cranked this out in its entirety in basically one sitting, and while I do have ideas for a much more focused and unpleasant version about Taylor walking in on her father with a gun in his hand, having a psychotic break and doing things like trying to replace her mother at Christmas by dressing up as her, leading into the weird sequence at Winslow where it's treated as more psychological horror where it's unclear what's real and what's delusion before it's made clear that yes, they really are sacrificing her, I also didn't anticipate ever writing wormfic again, and if I stop to try and plan and outline, I'll lose momentum and interest like I always do and neither this nor that other idea will ever get posted. Like, I tried reworking it and could literally feel myself losing interest in the project as I took it apart.
This ended up being all my ideas mushed together into a weird fever dream, and I don't consider it super successful at anything beyond being weird. The is-Taylor-drugged element is lazy drug trip nonsense, and while I had fun with the prose, it is very self-indulgent. It could have been a solid A- horror fic if I'd reworked it, but I just don't want to do that. I'm fine with a C-grade fic in this case.
The bits about crowds of faceless observers fetishizing Taylor's suffering... I have some unkind thoughts about some parts of this fandom, despite being just as guilty in some aspects. I tried to keep that from overwhelming that segment, but it still feels a bit heavy-handed. ...this whole fic is heavy-handed.
Don't expect me to write any more wormfic though. This was a massive surprise.