Nine
When I peeked into his room, he was sleeping so soundly that I was a little afraid he had died in the night,” Marshall said, nudging the dead man with his foot. “I think he was faking it.”
Benedikt rolled his eyes, then swatted Marshall’s foot away from the corpse.
“Could you give Roma some credit?”
“I think Roma is a pathological liar,” Marshall replied, shrugging. “He merely did not want to come out with us to look at dead bodies.”
Daylight had broken only an hour ago, but the streets were already roaring with activity. The sound of waves crashing onto the nearby boardwalk was barely audible from this alleyway, not with the chatter streaming in from the inner city. The early-morning glow encased the cold streets like an aura. Steam at the ports and the smoke from the factories pumped steadily upward, thick, sooty, and heavy.
“Oh, hush,” Benedikt said. “You’re distracting me from said task of inspecting dead bodies.” Frowning deeply, he was kneeling over the corpse that Marshall had nudged into the wall. Again, Benedikt and Marshall had been assigned cleanup duty, which not only encompassed the cleanup of the bloody corpses, but also the cleanup of the municipal ocers involved, paying o any and every legal force that tried to install themselves upon these dead gangsters.
“Distracting you?” Marshall dropped to a squat so that he was level with Benedikt. “If that is so, you should thank me for relieving the morbidity.”
“I would thank you if you helped me out,” Benedikt muttered. “We need these men identied before noon. At this rate, the only thing we will have
identied is the number of bodies here—” He rolled his eyes when Marshall looked around and started counting. “Six, Mars.”
“Six,” Marshall repeated. “Six dead bodies. Six-digit contracts. Six moons circling the world.” Marshall adored the sound of his own voice. In any circumstance where there was silence, he took it upon himself as a favor to the
world to ll it.
“Don’t start—”
Benedikt’s protest went unheard.
“Shall I compare him to a winter’s night?” Marshall proclaimed. “More breathtaking and more rugged: tempest breezes do tremble with less might—”
“You saw a stranger for two seconds on the street,” Benedikt interrupted dully. “Please calm down.”
“With eyes like deadly nightshade, lips like fresh fruit. A freckle atop his left cheek like”—Marshall paused, then suddenly shot to his feet—“like this strangely shaped spot on the ground.”
Benedikt stopped short, frowning. He stood too, squinting at the culpable object on the ground. It was much more than just a strangely shaped spot.
“It’s another insect.”
Marshall lifted a leg onto a jutting brick in the wall. “Oh, please no.”
Between the cracks in the pavement, a black speck dotted the cement, ordinary upon a mere, cursory glance. But just as an artist could pick out one accidental jerk of the paintbrush amid a smorgasbord of intentional slashes, the moment Benedikt’s eye landed on the speck, a shudder swept down his spine and told him that the canvas of the world had made a mistake. This creature wasn’t supposed to be here.
“It’s the same,” he said, gingerly pinching his ngers around the insect. “It’s the same sort of insect as the ones we found at the port and took to the laboratory.”
When Benedikt picked up the single dead thing and showed it to his wayward friend, he expected Marshall to make some crude comment or construct a song about the fragility of life. Instead, Marshall furrowed his brows.
“Do you remember Tsarina?” he asked suddenly.
Even for Marshall’s usual tangents and long-winded stories, this abrupt topic switch was odd. Still, Benedikt entertained him and replied, “Of course.”
Their golden retriever had passed away only last year. It had been a strange, mournful day, both in respect for their furry companion and in peculiarity over a death that for once hadn’t occurred with the press of a bullet and a spray of blood.
“Do you remember when Lord Montagov rst got her?” Marshall continued.
“Do you remember her bounding through the streets and rubbing noses with every other animal she encountered, be it a cat or a wild rat?”
Marshall was trying to get at something, but Benedikt could not yet determine what. He would never understand the way people like Marshall talked, in circles upon circles until his speech was the ouroboros swallowing itself.
“Yes, of course,” Benedikt answered, frowning. “She caught so many eas that they were jumping in and out of her fur—”
The ouroboros nally spat out its own tail.
“Knife.” Benedikt motioned for Marshall to rummage through his pockets.
“Give me your knife.”
Without missing a beat, Marshall icked a blade free and tossed. The handle glided into Benedikt’s palm cleanly, and Benedikt sliced the point down, shearing a strip through the corpse’s hair as thoroughly as he could. When the loose hair fell to the ground, Benedikt and Marshall leaned in at once to examine the dead man’s scalp.
Only then did Benedikt nearly throw up inside his mouth.
“That,” Marshall deadpanned, “is disgusting.”
There was only an inch of skin on show, an inch of gray-white between two crops of thick black hair. But in this space, a dozen pinky-nail-size bumps bulged forth, dotted homes for dead insects that had taken up residence just below the rst layer of skin. Benedikt’s scalp itched with phantom crawling at the sight, at the curled exoskeletons thinly visible under the membrane, at the legs and antennae and thoraxes trapped and frozen in time.
Benedikt tightened his grip on the knife. Cursing himself for his curiosity, he slowly attened the tufts of the dead man’s hair so it wasn’t blocking his view of
the exposed skin. Then, with his teeth gritted together and a wince dancing on the edge of his tongue, he pushed the tip of the blade into one of the bumps.
There was no sound of release nor any uid discharge, as Benedikt had been expecting from a sight so disgusting. In tense silence, interspersed only by the occasional toot of a car chugging along the nearby street, Benedikt used the knife to slit the thin skin atop one of the dead insects.
“Go on,” Benedikt said when one formerly buried insect became semi- exposed. “Give it a pull.”
Marshall looked at him as if he had suggested that they both slaughter a baby
and eat it. “You must be joking.”
“My hands are both occupied, Mars.”
“I hate you.”
Marshall inhaled a deep breath. He stuck two ngers gingerly into the slit. He pulled out the dead insect.
It came into the world with veins and vessels and capillaries attached to its belly. It was as if the insect were an entity unto itself and the dead man grew out of it, when really, the paper-thin lines of pink and white sprouting from the insect were being pulled from the man’s brain. Benedikt could have been fooled.
The veins trembled as a stray gust of wind blew in from the waterfront.
“What do you know?” Benedikt said. “I think we just discovered what’s causing the madness.”
