The Worm King by Steve Ryan Read Free Book Online

‘No silly. It was the first
thing she did on the carpet when we got her home.’
    ‘Do you count?’
    She thought for a moment. ‘Yes. I gave you a
whole dollar yesterday morning. Mummy said you’re probably a cereal killer and
I said I didn’t like breakfast either so maybe I’m one too, but she said most
likely not.’
    Someone began shouting at the other end of
the park near the Edmund Barton statue: sixty-seven.
    ‘You smiled when I gave you the money, so I
knew you didn’t really have mad cows disease. Your sign was fibbing!’
    Lord Brown held his hands up in mock surrender.
‘I’m cured. It’s true! I used your money to buy cow medicine.’ The girl looked
doubtful.
    ‘Where did you lose her?’
    ‘By the fountain. Our house is down that
road,’ she pointed vaguely to the eastern end of the park where the more
palatial homes tended to be. Lord Brown wondered if he’d ever urinated or slept
in her garden and suspected he might’ve.
    ‘Our chimney fell down and the lights
wouldn’t work so mummy said we had to come to the park. We couldn’t see walking
here and kept falling over on things in the road. I bumped into people twice,
I’m sure I did, it was really scary.’
    ‘It’s a scary night,’ he replied, wondering
why their chimney might’ve fallen. Over her shoulder he saw eight people by the
fountain, one sitting on the edge and another six standing with the faint
outline of perhaps two more on the far side of the structure out of his vision.
He allowed for one of these in the total: sixty-nine.
    His hand groped the seat to his right until
he found the bottle, which had an unpleasantly empty feel to it. He raised it
to his lips, letting a scanty thimbleful of warm, malty goodness trickle down. Soothing
and caressing, then gone. Almost at the point where numbers didn’t matter and now
the magic elixir was all gone. Forever. Seventy-one . . . click,
click . . .  you could feel the numbers physically ticking
over. Counting was like a creamy ratchet being drawn across minute nerve endings
fizzling on the underside of his skull. They’d fizzle and fizzle until the
malty wave completely soaked the embers.
    Speckled light flashed on the edge of his
vision for all the world like a grinning, evil face suddenly appearing and disappearing
rapidly over and over. He brushed a hand at his shoulder, trying to get the
thing away. Drinking dulled the face. So did clenching his eyes tightly, hunching
up and rocking back and forth; oh yes. Back again—oh God!—
    ‘Are you alright? Is the mad cows coming
back?’
    Lord Brown’s eyes opened and head flinched
with enough force to flick small droplets as far as his knees. ‘Good as gold. I’ll
take you over there, have a look around. Don’t worry, we’ll track her down.’ He
slid the suitcase out from under the park bench, unzipped it and withdrew his
notebook which he slipped into a breast pocket. The suitcase was rezipped and
pushed back under the seat.
    Another lot had drifted in from the road, joining
those at the fountain in the centre of the park. Solar lights spaced along the
walkway cast a dull glow through the rain but the surrounding buildings and
houses remained oddly dark. Seventy-nine.
    He remembered now when the power went off. All
the nearby houses and shops over the road had suddenly gone dark, and at
virtually the same time a bus broke down directly out in front of him. The reason
it stuck in his mind was the bus had just pulled out from the kerb and
travelled exactly one meter before its engine cut out. One meter! Cripes, he’d
laughed. Then he’d noticed several other cars stopped too. Eventually, the
people got off the bus.
    Lord Brown had been working his way through
the penultimate bottle. He recalled watching the dismal, wet crowd as they disembarked.
How could they do that to themselves? Climb into that metal monster and be ferreted
away to some red-brick hell-hole. What’s civilization come to? He’d given the
people a