Worm Hole

A short story

Claudio D’Andrea illustration from a photo by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird on Unsplash.com.

Originally published in Written Tales on Nov. 1, 2019.

On Sept. 27, 1940 during World War II, German bombers hit London’s Holland House during a raid. The country estate was destroyed but its east wing and almost all of its library was undamaged.

Worm wriggles along the bottom lip of the computer screen that displays the famous 1940 photograph of the bombed-out Holland House library — the charred and crumbled remains on the floor of the library of a great house in the Kensington area of London, England built in 1605, the time of Shakespeare and King James.

The photograph shows three well-dressed English gentlemen perusing titles in a scene that looks like something from Beckett or Sartre: Three Characters in Search of a Book. Below them, a mass of rubble: collapsed wooden beam, a broken ladder, cloth-covered chair. Above: a grey sky and a ceiling split wide open by German firebombers, the mayhem burying the music and intellectual life that once thrived here.

Famous personalities once gathered in this space, in real time and real space. Byron, Dickens, Disraeli, Macaulay. Joseph Addison died in this very building.

Worm knows nothing of war and the wonders of literature. He just wriggles along, undulating waves of its slinky self getting to where Worm wants to go.

He inches along the bottom of the screen past some Poe and one volume in the fallen debris and ankle-breaking clutter — Shelley’s literary monument Ozymandias, its shattered visage on the frontispiece a sneer of cold contempt.

Worm cares nothing of stone and poetry either.

The greys and blacks and whites of Holland House Library are a comfort to Worm’s unseeing eyes. But static electricity splits open a tiny wrinkle in the screen and a bright yellow light shocks his senses.

Worm leaves the digital realm, slips inside the scene.

One of the three men in the scene, the one in the bowler, reaches out toward Worm. Grabs a leatherbound title from the shelf. Pulls it out with Worm clinging to its festering, moldy corner.

Handsomely illustrated, the book is about trees and its rings.

It’s an old title and cites the works and insights of so many pioneers, including the ancient Greeks and da Vinci. It gives off warmth and a dewy, crumpled paper comfort.

Worm slides toward the centre of one illustration, where a crack opens up in the innermost ring.

A vortex swallows all: ladder, broken beam, Hitler, bowler, tree bark, Poe, tattered cloth, trunkless legs of stone and Worm. All of it, all of them — tunnelled into a different dimension.

Our hero disappears from the scene to conquer another world.