Wolf Worm — Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

Of the next days, I remember little. I alternately froze and burned, wracked with shuddering that felt as if it would shake apart my bones. Those—and the bitterness of quinine sliding over my tongue—were the only things that I brought with me back to consciousness.

When I finally woke for good, I was looking up at familiar tin tiles with dragonflies on them. There was a weight on my ankles that began, almost immediately, to purr.

“Awake, are you?” asked a familiar voice. I turned my head on the pillow and saw Ma Kersey sitting by my bedside. “Going to stay awake this time, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I croaked. My throat felt as dry and tattered as an autumn leaf.

“Here, here, let’s get this into you.” She held out a cup of tea. I took it in a hand that only shook a little. I was braced for more quinine, but it was deliciously sweet and slid kindly across my dry tongue. “My own honey,” said Ma Kersey. “Well, the honey from my bees, anyway. They make it, but

they’re kind enough to give me some.”

“How long have I been sick?” I asked.

“’Bout two days.” She took the empty cup back. “Bilious fever. Nasty flare-up, it was. Rose was afraid we’d lose you. Sent Jackson to roust me at the crack of dawn and bring me back here.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, fighting back unexpected tears.

Gratitude, mostly. I was out of the habit of being helped. “Sorry,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure if I was apologizing for having been sick or for crying.

“No need to be.” Ma Kersey made a gentle clucking noise, like a contented hen. “Happens to us all sooner or later. You’ve had the fever

before, I take it?”

I nodded.

“Thought so. Would’ve taken the fever a lot longer to break otherwise.”

She clucked again. “Though this was a mighty fine fever nonetheless. You were raving like a Baptist preacher in a whorehouse for a bit there. Wasn’t sure whether to dunk you in cold water or give an Amen.”

“Oh Lord.” I put my hand to my head. What had I said? I could barely remember—I had been trying to warn someone, hadn’t I? There was

something—

The shed.

The botflies.

The corpse that wasn’t a corpse.

I sat up, horrified, and the room slewed sideways. Ma Kersey grabbed my shoulder. “Here now, settle down. You haven’t had a bite to eat in two days. Fever’s broke, but you aren’t gonna be up and around for a bit yet.”

I allowed her to push me back onto the pillows. She stood up, rearranged her shawls, and said something about getting me some food. The door creaked as she left. Smiley, annoyed by all my fidgeting, stalked the length of the bed twice, then draped himself across my shins as if it was his duty to keep me in bed.

As soon as the door closed, I began running my hands over my skin, my scalp, everywhere that I could reach, feeling for … something. (wolf worms, you’re feeling for wolf worms, they might be inside you

right now) Nothing.

I collapsed back, exhausted from my brief bout of activity. Of course there wasn’t. It was ridiculous. I had malaria, not parasites. Why had I

thought otherwise? (you know why) I rubbed my forehead. I’d gone to the shed, hadn’t I? And there had been a body there, and it had spoken to me … but it had been so dark and the flame had gone out and I had been so cold … Had any of that really happened?

The memory seemed to be swathed in fog. I was almost sure that I had gone to the shed, but after that … had I really seen a body at all?

The mental image of skin sealed to bone like a mummy was vivid, but was I remembering something real, or constructing it out of other memories, the way you piece together a dream?

Even if you did see a body, you couldn’t possibly have seen botflies on it.

They don’t live in dead flesh. And it couldn’t have talked to you. That had to be the fever.

But why would Halder have a body in his shed anyway? How would he even get a body? You don’t just find corpses lying around. Or … well, I suppose a tramp could have died in the woods, that’s not impossible. Or Halder could have been out robbing graves … no, don’t be ridiculous, he’d hire resurrection men to do it. Body snatching for scientific research wasn’t as popular as it had been earlier in the century, but it certainly still happened. Would Halder pay someone to steal a dead body for him so he could use it to test a hypothesis about insects?

Of course he would. No question at all.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Dreadful, but not impossible. My delirious vision of botfly maggots and manacles and impossibly long fingernails … that was impossible. You didn’t see any of that. You were fevered already and you’ve been spending too much time with botflies and your brain put together a horrible dream out of parts.

I was grudgingly impressed with my brain. I’d had no idea that it had such a capacity for the grotesque.

The door swung open again, and Ma Kersey bustled back in, accompanied by Mrs. Kent carrying a tray. “Glad to see you up,” the housekeeper said. “We were all pretty worried.”

“You … you found me in the kitchen, didn’t you?” I could just barely remember a whirl of faces.

“Sure did. You looked worse’n a drowned rat too.” She set the tray down on the nightstand.

“You saved my life,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Bah,” Mrs. Kent said gruffly. “Nothing doing. It was all Ma Kersey. I’m no kind of nurse.”

I reached out and took her hand and held it as tightly as I could in my weakened state. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t embarrass

us both.

Her fingers were rough and callused and much stronger than mine. After a second, she squeezed back.

“Now then,” she said, stepping back and shoving her hands into her apron. “You eat some of this food and you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

Ma Kersey took up her station again and I turned my attention to the food. It was scrambled eggs and a sausage with gravy. Mrs. Kent apparently felt that invalids were better served with hearty fare than with thin gruel. I could find no fault with this program.

I made it through about half the meal before exhaustion caught up with me. You wouldn’t think that eating would make you so tired. I drank more tea, then lay back on the pillows, half dozing, while Ma Kersey told me all the latest gossip. It was mostly names I didn’t know, in situations I was unfamiliar with, but I enjoyed it all the same.

“… and Eloise, now, she thinks she’ll marry him, but everyone knows his mama’s got him well and truly under her thumb. Even if she gets him to the altar, she won’t get much joy of it. But you can’t tell Eloise anything, never could, not since she was a little girl…”

My mind started to drift. The only places for it to go were unpleasant though. The body in the shed—had it really been there? Had I actually seen it at all?

“… called him everything but a child of God. Well, now, Hiram wasn’t going to take that from a gal young enough to be his daughter…”

Was it actually a body? I wondered vaguely. What I saw … what I thought I saw … was practically mummified. Nothing mummifies here. It’s too wet. I was standing in water. If you put a body down there, it wouldn’t look like that, would it?

Maybe I hadn’t seen it. One of the first things you learn as a naturalist is how flawed and fallible human observation is. I’ve lost track of the number of flowers that I would swear looked one way, only to sit down in front of a specimen with a sketchbook and realize that it was totally different. And which was more likely, after all—that I had seen a dead body behaving in a way that bodies shouldn’t behave, then began to hallucinate five minutes later, or that I was already hallucinating? That strange pinprick brightness

around my vision, the shivering … no, I’d obviously been feverish by the time I went in.

“… so he lost it all gambling and was too afraid to tell his wife, so he made up a story about being attacked in Greensboro and whacked his own head on a post trying to make it look good. But he misjudged it and knocked hisself silly and babbled out everything to the doctor trying to patch him up…”

Halder was a strange man, and clearly he’d been violent at least once in his life, but just because somebody shoots someone else in anger doesn’t mean they’re likely to keep corpses in a shed. There is not what you’d call a straight line between the two behaviors. And why would he bring chickens to a room that held a dead body and nothing else? And why would Phelps be covering for him? No, none of it made any sense.

“… Martha’s youngest is getting married, and good for her. Fine young man, from over Bynum way…”

On the other hand, if I’d been half out of my mind with fever and I saw something like a pile of dermestid beetles—well, I didn’t know what that would look like, but a box of mealworms makes a kind of humped-up, dry brown mess as they eat and crap and shed. Suppose there had been a table with something like that on it? If the beetles had been stripping a body—a chicken, say—I could have seen bones. And in candlelight, already delirious, I saw that and my brain filled in mummified dead body. (is that really what happened though?) A knock on the door startled me out of my thoughts and Ma Kersey out of her monologue. Sally poked her head around the door, skipped in, said, “I’m glad you’re feeling better, miss, I picked you these,” and presented me with a handful of bedraggled flowers. I thanked her and Ma Kersey fetched the jam jar off the painting table and filled it with water and the remains of a June bug.

Sally was followed by Jackson, who gripped my hand and said, “Gave us quite a scare, Miss Wilson.”

“And I hear I have you to thank for summoning my nursemaid here,” I said.

“Thought he was gonna bang the house down, I did,” Ma Kersey said, with a flash of gold dentistry. “Usually it’s only the expectant fathers that pound on the door like that.” Jackson grinned, unrepentant.

My last visitor was not nearly so welcome. Phelps appeared in the doorway like a bird of ill omen and I suppressed a guilty start. Did he know I’d been in the shed?

He can’t know. He was the one who left it unlocked. Even if he suspects someone’s been in there, there’s no proof that it was you. In fact, you’ve been collapsed with malaria, so you’re the last person he should suspect.

Besides, why should he care? It was just beetles, right?

(was it though?) “Mister Phelps,” I said coolly.

He didn’t advance into the room. In fact, he didn’t even look at me, but at the opposite wall. He was holding his hat in both hands, and I got the strange feeling that he was embarrassed. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is it because I’m in bed? Does visiting a woman’s bedroom offend his sense of Christian morals?

“I have prayed for your recovery,” he said stiffly. “I am pleased that you are improved.”

Oddly enough, I believed him. He probably had prayed.

“Ma Kersey here is an excellent nurse,” I said, unwilling to give Phelps’s God all the credit.

“She is indeed,” he said, lifting a hand to touch the back of his head. I saw the edge of a bandage and raised my eyebrows.

“Pfff, that wasn’t nothin’,” Ma Kersey said. “Fell down and raised a goose egg, that’s all. Jackson could have patched you up just as well. Just hard to work on the back of your own head, that’s all.”

“You hit your head, Mr. Phelps?”

He nodded gingerly and touched the bandage again. “Pride is a sin,” he remarked to no one in particular, “and it hurts only my pride to tell you. A wasp flew at my face and I lost my footing. My head hit a log.

Providentially, it was rotten.”

“A wasp?” I asked.

He finally looked at me, if only for a moment, then rapidly away, as if my sensible cotton nightgown was an incitement to debauchery. “Doubtless you could have identified it more specifically.”

I snorted. “No, no. Not while it was flying at my head—” (black-and-yellow fly buzzing at my face)

“—I couldn’t. I’m sure Dr. Halder could.” I had to stop and catch my breath. “Forgive me. I’m not fully recovered, I don’t think.”

Ma Kersey clucked her tongue and got to her feet. “Sweet of you to visit, Mr. Phelps, but Miss Wilson needs to rest.”

“Yes. Of course.” He nodded sharply to me, then turned away. I got a better view of the bandage, which was large and stood out starkly against the darkness of his hair.

Ma Kersey escorted him into the studio and I heard the murmur of their voices for a minute, culminating with her raising her voice and saying, “Stop picking at it!”

She was back a moment later and dropped back into her chair. “Always the same,” she muttered. “They pick and pick and then they complain it’s not healing quick enough.”

I smiled. Ma Kersey settled her shawls like a hen settling her feathers and sat back down.

I was tired, it was true, though mostly I had wanted to get rid of Phelps.

No matter what I told myself, I was still half convinced that he must know I had been in the shed.

Which was another argument for my not having seen a dead body, wasn’t it? Surely Phelps wouldn’t just blithely accept dead bodies lying around. According to the Kents, he was even more of a zealot than he seemed in casual conversation. Surely good Christians would object to that sort of thing?

Halder had presumably asked Phelps to check on the beetles in his absence. Phelps and Halder had known each other for years, after all. What was it Jackson had said? That the two of them had been present when the supposed blood thieves were killed? That they were in at the death. Yes, that had been it.

Which reminded me of something that I had dismissed at first, before I had realized just how sharp Ma Kersey was.

“Ma Kersey,” I broke in, interrupting a lengthy anecdote about a church service that had gone awry when birds had roosted in the organ pipes, “you told me about the three-month babies? When we were talking about the killings that happened in the woods? What really happened there?”

She fell silent. I was watching her face and saw her smile fade. She didn’t frown, but her face went slack, as if she were no longer inhabiting the

skin. I plowed ahead. “You never said why you thought the two people that were killed were the ones you’d delivered.”

“Ah…” Ma Kersey shook her head grimly. “I didn’t, not at first. But see,

they killed ’em once and buried ’em—”

Once? I thought, but didn’t interrupt.

“—but then people started thinking maybe that hadn’t been enough.

Lotta stories about vampires sleeping in a coffin and when you dig ’em up, they’re looking all healthy, while half their kin have dropped dead. So somebody came asking me what I thought.” She pursed her lips. “Me, I thought it was all a load of nonsense, but I said if they were that worried, well … probly some people care if you dig up their bones, but given what those two’d been up to, I didn’t much care what they thought. So a group of us all went trudging off—me and the preacher and about half the men who did for ’em in the first place—and dug ’em up again. That’s when I knew.”

Ma Kersey was a born storyteller, same as Jackson. She didn’t much like telling this one, I thought, but she still knew how to tell it. I knew my place as well. “What happened?”

“The man was dead, right enough. They’d shoved a stake through him and the worms had been at work on what was left. The woman though … she’d been alive at some point, under all that dirt there. They didn’t get no coffins, just a deep hole, and the woman wasn’t lying dead on her back like she’d been placed. Her body was almost sat up, like she’d been digging her way out. Looked like she’d eaten a big mess of dirt. To make room, maybe?

No idea. Damndest thing I ever saw.” She leaned back in the chair and studied the ceiling tiles. “Anyway, general opinion was to burn ’em, and the preacher wasn’t minded to put a stop to it. Truth is, I think we were all a little scared the woman’d start moving again. So they laid ’em both out and burned ’em right then and there. Probly the man didn’t need it—a shot to the head kills you no matter what you’re made of, I’m thinking—but the woman … I dunno. I’ve seen some things, but that was one of the worst, her belly all stretched out full of dirt like she was gonna chew her way out of the ground.”

I felt a bit ill, whether from the story or malaria or too much sausage gravy. Still, I couldn’t see how she’d known that they were the same ones she delivered.

“It was the teeth, child,” said Ma Kersey, rearranging her shawls again.

“When we were all looking at her mouth, the way she’d been chewing through red clay like it was taffy, I saw it. Some of ’em had broken, but she had a mouthful of milk teeth like needles. So did the man. Just like a kitten.

Just like the day they was born.”

I stared at her. It was impossible, the whole story was impossible, but while Jackson might have been putting me on, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that Ma Kersey believed she was telling the truth.

“Once I realized, I went out to their grandaddy’s farm,” Ma Kersey said, gazing out the window now, where the trees shifted their leaves against the light. “Found the old shed. Full of chains it was, and big iron cuffs like the plantation bastards used to put on slaves.” Her mouth worked like she was going to spit, but she remembered that she was indoors and didn’t. I thought of the manacles that I had seen—no, that I hadn’t seen, that I couldn’t have seen—and put a hand to my forehead.

“Full of chains,” Ma Kersey repeated, “and the house empty, like nobody’d been there in a year or two. I s’pose if any of the neighbors came looking, they assumed the old preacher up and left during the war. I doubt it though.” She put her head to one side, eyes bright and cold as a bird’s. “But I’ll tell you this—they never did find his body.”

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