A Wolf Called Wormwood by Joel Tagert

A Wolf Called Wormwood
By Joel Tagert
Published Issue 130, October 2024

Remember to shut the door. 

Jon did not remember very much at this point. There had been a time, he knew, when his memory had been truly capacious, a prodigious palace whose pillars were a host of recondite systems and abstruse techniques for recollection. He had written books on the subject, entertained dinner parties, won trivia shows, educated the already erudite in hallowed halls. Now his memories were few, and precious, and threatened. 

Remember to shut the door. 

He was sitting cross-legged upon a large square stone in the courtyard of his house. The house was unusual in many ways, built by him for an unusual purpose. Constructed in the ancient Roman style, the courtyard was surrounded by exactly twelve rooms, with a hallway that ran around its inner perimeter. The memory palace method was also called the Roman house method, as this was one way the ancients had recalled their speeches and whatever else, by mentally placing each item sequentially in the house’s room. Previously there had been four doors from the hallway entering the courtyard, but three of these had been first screwed shut and then bricked over. The remaining door, the one he faced now, was a storm door of heavy steel.

Little pig, little pig, let me in!

In his hand he held an eight by ten photograph. A light mist was falling, as it so often did in this part of the state — what was its name? — glistening on the thick paper. He still remembered why the photo was important; he would remember this to the last, because he had placed this single memory in the courtyard with him. Once it had shown Llew and himself walking hand in hand through a meadow bordered by yellow aspen and deep green pine.

Now, however, the photo had changed. Though only five years old and stored in a photo album, it looked much older, its surface pitted and flaked. Over the last six months its color had first faded to sepia, then deepened into an unnatural crimson, as though the forest were ablaze. The two human figures had turned to patchy silhouettes, then grown diffuse, their shapes shifting. At first he had wondered what new form it would take. Now, as the legs, body and tail became clear, it was obvious. He focused hard, boring into the paper, and was rewarded by two new blister-spots appearing, red as rubies. The wolf called Wormwood opened its eyes. 

A low sound, less a howl than a disquieting subliminal vibration, neither human nor lupine, shivered through the air. It was equally loud in the inner space, where the mental image of the house, his memory palace, resided, and he cringed. The wolf was at the door!

He focused on the first room, plumping up the memory like a juicy slab of steak.

*  *

It was Eoghan who first brought it to his attention, Professor Eoghan Ó Cléirigh (Owen O’Cleary, but Eoghan was very Irish and would certainly not spell his name like a damn Englishman). He was attending a seminar on medieval manuscripts at the University of Washington (that was it, that was the state) and they met for coffee. 

Eoghan was distracted, even distraught, taking off his glasses again and again to rub at his eyes and temples, running his fingers through his thinning blond hair, staring out the windows. After some preliminary small talk, he burst out, “Do you remember a woman from the Trinity conference? A blond, I think. You dated her.” Like an accusation.

Jon cocked his head. “Are you thinking of Mallory?” Whom Jon had dated for six weeks or so toward the end of his stay in Dublin. 

“No, no, no. She was at the conference. She gave a presentation. There was some controversy.”

“Maybe, but I certainly didn’t date anybody there.”

“Fine, forget the dating. But do you remember her? This is your area, right? ‘Elephants never forget’ and all that.” This was a reference to Elbert the Elephant Never Forgets, a kid’s book Jon had written teaching children basic mnemonic techniques. “Can you just remember her name?”

“Probably. Let me concentrate.” He closed his eyes and lowered his head. 

Jon routinely memorized the names of everyone he met. Here he had placed them in the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity, the images standing row by row for his mental inspection: a shamrock burning (Seamus Byrne), a hollow statue of Michelangelo’s David (David Holloway), a swan holding a mallet (Siobhan O’Malley), and so on. He got seventeen names down before he stopped. 

The image there was … not missing, not merely forgotten, which would have been perfectly normal. When that happened he would refer to what he called his Record of Days, the journal where he recorded names and places. Rather, the image was … corrupted. The mental space felt blistered, painful, hard to focus on. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. A sudden sharp headache stabbed his temples and he covered his eyes.

“What is it?” Eoghan asked, reaching out to seize his wrist. “Who is she?”

The thing was, Jon was somehow sure he should remember this person, but her face would not come into focus, no matter how he tried. Still, he did manage to make out the mnemonic image associated with her. 

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I can’t remember her name, exactly. I see a, a well, a low well, but it’s shaped like a rose. Maybe, uh, Rose, or Roswell?” But that wasn’t right.

“No, no,” Eoghan breathed, relief blossoming on his face. “It’s Llewellyn. Llewellyn Rose.” 

On just hearing the name, Jon’s eyes overflowed with tears, though for the life of him he couldn’t see why. Llewellyn Rose! The name stabbed him in the heart. 

*  *

The wolf’s whine grew louder, became a growl, then a sudden roar, and the doors to the first room, both mental and physical, burst apart. The wolf swarmed in like a rush of burning acid, and Jon bent over, head filled with pain. 

He fought to recover his concentration, knowing that whatever had been in the twelfth room, it was gone now. Eleven to go: a trail of crumbs.

*  *

Room eleven: The hunt. 

Eoghan thought he and Lwellyn had worked together, researching medieval manuscripts. Now it was all a blur. When he looked into his boxes and binders of notes he found them inexplicably damaged, the text on page after page indecipherable, water-damaged, moth-eaten, food-stained, especially the names of the authors. His electronic files were likewise corrupted, unopenable. 

“There’s some force at work here,” he insisted. “I didn’t do this.”

At first Jon was skeptical, but then he reviewed his own journals — his most precious physical possessions — and found to his shock that they too were damaged beyond legibility, both the Record of Days and his personal journal, where he recorded thoughts and impressions. 

But his memory palaces remained, and for a week he shut himself in his house and reviewed them intensely, paying special attention to anywhere he felt a burning discomfort. Herpetic lesions of the mind. In each of these places — and there were dozens — the content of the memory had been destroyed. 

However, the images remained, a series of visual puns (now riddles) whose answers they had to decipher. Fortunately, they were both experts. Painstakingly they reconstructed the research. It led them to a book, a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript originating in Switzerland, now kept at Trinity. It was called the Apocalypse of Saint Gall, and together they traveled to Dublin to view it firsthand. 

They were both fascinated by the surreal images from the Book of Revelation, but even more so by the many figures and notes crammed into the margins. “How did I forget this?” Eoghan said wonderingly.

One illustration in particular gripped them. A star with a tail like a dragon’s fell through the sky, roiling smoke, while the earth beneath it burned, villagers fleeing strangely angular buildings. The verses beneath, Revelation 8:10-11, were in vulgate Latin, but Eoghan translated them effortlessly in a hoarse whisper: 

“And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

Beneath the verse, in the wide lower margin, a later artist had drawn a vivid addendum: a red-eyed wolf, chained, slavering and furious.

*  *

Jon’s nemesis fell upon these memories like acid. He began to shake. This must be how it felt to have a stroke. The wolf was moving faster, impatient for the final prize, the last course. Jon had been hunting it, but it had also been hunting him. Room by room it took from him the substance of his past, memories of his friends, family, lovers. Most of all it seemed to desire memories of itself: not surprising, since these were the greatest threat to it. 

It was a being of hunger, a devouring demon. Jon wondered if it had a memory of its own. Perhaps it was like the daemons of myth, who would answer any question if compelled. It had to feed regularly, usually nightly, sneaking into bedrooms to crouch over the sleepers, stealing their pasts. 

Once in a while though, it would gorge. When it did, its victims would burst into flames where they sat. Eoghan had died that way. All that remained of him were his feet, still in his Chelsea boots. 

This memory was in the second room; and then it was gone. 

*  *

The last room was devoted to Llewellyn. It had taken time, but finally Jon had recalled her face, sitting in the aspen grove they loved. Her skin translucent in the sunlight, her smile easy and open. 

Here the beast lingered, savoring its meal. Jon wept steadily, finally not even knowing what he was mourning. 

Then … the creature paused. It regarded the door. Jon waited, willing it to enter the courtyard, but still it didn’t.

It was suspicious. It had tested the other doors and seen the shuttered windows. Perhaps it also sensed that the best part of Jon’s memories were gone. It had sucked out the juicy bits until only a husk remained. And this had the smell of a trap. 

“No,” Jon whispered. It couldn’t leave him here, in this barren state. 

There was another name, he thought, one they’d used before. He looked down at his hand and saw it written there. He’d anticipated this. It was a silly name, taken from the wolf in The NeverEnding Story, the wolf that helped the Nothing. He and a friend — what was the friend’s name? — used to joke about it.

“Gmork!” he called out, knowing the creature hated it, hated being mocked, hated being known. “Gmork, Gmork, Gmork!” Sounding like the Swedish chef from the Muppets. 

It worked. The door slammed open. 

Early on they had wondered if the creature even had a body, or if it were a true spirit, some floating evil, like a cloud. But eventually they had seen its physical form: about man-sized, low to the ground on four oddly jointed legs like a salamander’s, with a whip tail and black fur that writhed where there was no wind. Most notable were the eyes, red as blood.

Wormwood hesitated only a moment. Then, in a single spring, it was on him, sinking its stinger into his abdomen. His spine arched, body immediately beginning to stiffen.

Remember to shut the door!

The physical door had already swung shut, propelled by strong mechanisms. But the wolf was tricky: It existed in two planes at all times, and if trapped in the physical world, it could still escape in the mental plane, and vice versa. 

Now though, Jon closed the inner door, the door to his true sanctum. The mind, he knew, was a place. Most of all it was a house: this house. He closed the door and erased it, smoothed it into stone, roofed it in steel, much as the physical courtyard had been roofed over in steel bars. 

The creature took everything from him, even his name, so he was left staring upward, blindly. His body was overheated, pouring sweat. But still he remembered one single phrase, whispering it again and again. The wolf paused in its feeding, sensing something was the matter. It looked around, realizing a circumstance it had rarely before encountered. It was in a cage. 

It tried the door, climbed the walls, tested the bars and found them firm. It shrieked in fury. Again it heard the nameless man whisper, hating the sound of it, hearing in the words the mewing cries of its own eventual starvation:

“Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin. Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin …”