Wolf Worm — Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

Ma Kersey went home the next morning, informing me that I was out of the woods but to take it easy for a few days. I was both sorry to see her go and relieved to no longer be considered an invalid requiring round-the-clock nursing. I tried to give her money, but was informed that the doctor would be covering the bills as part of the household expenses. I didn’t know what to think of that. I didn’t like to think well of Halder, but I couldn’t deny that it was a load off my mind.

My sleep was still troubled. Troubled, ha. Awful, frankly. My dreams no longer had the horrible immediacy of delirium, but that was the best that could be said. Nightmares about wolf worms and mummified bodies flowed into Ma Kersey’s stories about the three-month babies and the possum scratching endlessly at the door. My own fault for asking, I suppose. Not that I believed for a moment that the blood thieves and the three-month babies were the same. If one family is prone to a congenital deformity like pointed teeth, then it’s no surprise if it pops up elsewhere in the region.

Darwin’s inherited traits explained a great deal.

Even if she had been a killer, the thought of the poor woman buried alive, trying to bite through the dirt with her mouth full of malformed teeth, joined the imagery that populated my nightmares. Sometimes I was trapped underground with a body, trying to claw my way through the earth to escape. Sometimes I was trying to dig down to find someone. Often it was Louisa, even though I didn’t know what she looked like, even though Ma Kersey had assured me that she’d gotten away.

Between this and the remains of the malaria, I woke up barely more rested than when I went to sleep. Still, I didn’t want to complain. The Kents

had had to save me once already, and I would have been embarrassed to go whining about bad dreams.

I did use the excuse of recovery to avoid painting again immediately. I rambled around the gardens instead. It was June and it was hot but not as punishing as it would be in August. The heat was part of what made the late summer malaria flare-ups so brutal. (Not that they were fun at any time of year, mind you, but it’s easier to bring down a fever when the air isn’t hotter than the patient.) I wondered if I’d have another flare-up in August. It seemed desperately unfair to have two in short order. Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d had this one. A doctor would probably tell me it had been “excitement of the nerves” that caused a relapse.

Between the possum and this job, I’ve certainly had plenty of excitement, it’s true. Though I didn’t think I had any nerves to speak of. Oh well, we live and learn.

When it was too warm to wander, I looked through Louisa’s sketchbooks. I found myself poring over the face of the man in the last few books, the one with the lean face. Saul Gregor, the man she’d fallen in love with? It struck me as likely. There was tenderness etched into the lines, but she had never written anything beside his face. Perhaps even then, she had been too frightened of what Halder might do if he found out to commit anything to paper.

She was more right than she could have known. I sat up, rubbing my back, which ached from hunching over the wooden chest. I don’t know what I was hoping to find.

Well, no, that wasn’t true. I was hoping to find a note left by Louisa that said something like: Hello, artist reading this, please feel free to keep working for my husband even though he killed my lover, I really don’t mind and you’re not a bad person. I wasn’t expecting to find it, but it would have been nice.

I snorted. Idiot. Still looking for absolution, aren’t you?

The books had none to give me. The air had cooled a trifle though, and perhaps nature could give me what humans couldn’t. I picked up my own sketchbook and went back outside to the gardens.

Jackson was working over by the vegetable garden. Well, I say working, but it mostly consisted of standing, staring at something by his feet, walking

in a circle, stopping, staring up at the sky, and scratching the back of his

neck. I ambled in his direction.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Nah, just varmints being too clever for their own good.” He gave me a sheepish grin. “The doc telegrammed and told me to see if I couldn’t trap another couple possums, preferably with the wolf worms.”

“And?”

He nudged the object on the ground with his foot. It looked like a wooden box with a few extra attachments and a lid hanging by one leather hinge. “Caught one, sure enough, but it got out again. Since then, no luck at all. Something’s springing ’em and taking the bait though.”

“Raccoon?” I asked. Raccoons are as clever as the Devil and they can figure out a simple latch in no time at all.

“That’s all I can think of. Got to be a pair of them together though. One couldn’t do it all by itself.”

I remembered the one that I had seen staring at me from the tree before the possum had showed up. Had it been infected with the same strange larva? There had been something odd about its face, but it had been too far away to tell. Somehow I couldn’t regret the distance.

No, there’s no lack of excitement of the nerves to go around … I walked back to the garden. Fat bumblebees careened into flowers, which swayed under their weight. Beetles rolled in the golden stamens of oakleaf hydrangea and tiny striped hoverflies hung suspended by the bottlebrushes of giant blue hyssop. I did not know the species of most of them. Normally I would have been eager to learn, but I had a gloomy feeling that if I did, I’d find out that they were parasitic on some other species. I sat down on a bench and leaned my head back, admiring the plants instead. There are parasitic plants, but not many of them, and so far as we know, beech trees don’t much care if a Monotropa uniflora sets up among its roots.

A shadow fell over my face. I looked up, startled, and saw the unlovely face of Phelps looking down at me. I squawked and scrambled to my feet.

“Miss Wilson,” he said.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “You startled me.”

He nodded gravely. His eyes didn’t leave my face, and after a moment, it started to get uncomfortable. I looked away, telling myself that I broke into

the shed was not actually written on my forehead.

It was something of a relief, therefore, when he slid a hand under the bandage on his head and began scratching at it.

“If you keep picking at that, Ma Kersey will yell at you,” I said.

“Forgive me,” he said, dropping his hand. “It itches abominably.”

“That probably means it’s healing.”

He said nothing. He was standing too close, but the bench was already pressing against the backs of my legs. Unless I wanted to climb over the seat, I had no immediate way to retreat.

“Can I help you, Mister Phelps?” I asked, not entirely kindly.

Phelps gave this the lengthy consideration that he gave everything. “Will you walk with me, Miss Wilson?”

“Um.” I cast about for a reason to refuse. “I fear I’m still recovering from my illness at the moment…”

“We won’t go far. There’s something I wish to show you.”

I wanted to keep arguing, but if he suspected me of something, then it would probably only make me seem more suspicious. And from Phelps, at least, impropriety was unlikely to be an issue. “All right,” I said, trying not to sound as ungracious as I felt. I shoved my pencil in my pocket.

He led me around the shaded side of the house, toward the woods. They were certainly much cooler than the rest of the grounds, so I didn’t protest.

Maybe he wanted my opinion on a plant? “I wish the heat would break,” I said, “but I suppose that won’t happen until fall.”

“It is in God’s hands,” intoned Phelps, demonstrating his superior grasp of small talk. I stifled a sigh. Even the preacher at the church, he of the multi-hour sermons, could talk about the weather without invoking the Almighty.

“Here,” said Phelps, at a spot that looked no different from any other. I glanced around, looking for whatever botanical mystery required my attention. Nothing presented itself. Sweet gum and hickory and a stand of tulip trees, a few Christmas ferns, and a willow oak with an impressive display of bracket fungus. Lord, don’t let him ask me about the fungus. I never can tell my turkey tails apart.

“Miss Wilson,” Phelps said, reaching into his pocket. “I wonder what you might think of this.”

Something about the way he held his hands in that moment, one cupped over the other, was so perfectly the image of a man presenting an engagement ring that I had a brief, horrible thought that Jackson had been right. Oh god, please tell me Phelps isn’t about to propose!

I felt a stab of relief when he opened his hands and it wasn’t a ring. No, of course not, he barely knows you, what an absurd thought. He held the object out and I took it, unthinking.

It was a candle. White wax, half burnt, with a dribble of wax down the side and a black wick. A perfectly ordinary candle, the same kind that burned throughout the house, the same kind that I worked by in the studio at night.

The kind I’d taken down into the room below the shed.

The kind I’d dropped, half burnt, when I had fled.

Years of enduring Headmistress Silverton came to my rescue. My mind screamed, He knows! He knows! but not a muscle moved in my face. I looked at the candle then up at Phelps, and let a puzzled line form between my eyebrows. “A candle?”

His face was still as well. I think perhaps he was surprised. “Do you know where I found this?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I think Mrs. Kent keeps a few dozen in the hall closet.”

“I found it,” he said, without acknowledging my response, “on the stairs in the shed.”

I waited, projecting polite disinterest as hard as I could. “And?” I said, after this pronouncement had hung in the air for a moment.

“You’re the only one who could have left it there.”

I rolled my eyes with exaggerated annoyance. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been in bed for the past few days.”

“You must have dropped it before that.”

I briefly considered arguing that it could have been Jackson or Mrs.

Kent, but throwing anyone else in the path of Phelps seemed like a cruel trick. “How do you know you didn’t leave it yourself?”

“We only use lanterns.”

“Fine, then maybe a rat dragged it in. They eat candles, you know.” I shoved the offending candle in my pocket and folded my arms, calling on all of my experience as schoolteacher who is getting tired of having this conversation.

He leaned forward. He was very tall and I felt my spine trying to sway back, out of the way. I stood my ground. “Nothing goes in or out of that shed, Miss Wilson. It’s built special that way. But you’ve been inside. You saw.”

The lines on his face were pulling tight, his jaw clenched. Adrenaline trailed cold insect feet down my spine. I had the feeling that it no longer mattered what I said. Phelps knew what he knew. Even if he had been wrong, it would not have mattered. Damnation. I can’t bluff my way out of this, can I?

Those washed-out blue eyes bored into mine. “God hates a liar, Miss Wilson.”

“Then He must be quite angry at you for telling people that shed is full of gunpowder,” I snapped.

To my astonishment, he took a half step back, as if I had struck him. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “I have done what I must. I am … I was … trying to protect you.” He reached up and dug his fingers into the back of his scalp.

“Why would you even care?” I asked, taking a step back of my own. I wanted to bolt and run, but if I did, like the monsters of my childhood, he was sure to chase after me. “So the doctor keeps his bugs down there. Why all the secrecy?”

Phelps’s face went momentarily slack. Once again, I had the feeling I’d startled him—no, I’d shocked him. He looked as if I’d hit him with a board. (why would that shock him?) That was the moment when I should have bolted. I should have screamed for Jackson and run for the house. Phelps would still have caught me, most likely, but Jackson might have heard.

But I was too used to being a schoolteacher, where your control of the class depends on never showing weakness. I still thought that if I stayed calm and kept Phelps off-balance, I could get through it.

“You’re a cold one,” said Phelps slowly, still watching me as if I’d

grown horns. (why would he say that?) And then, in a chilly little copperhead whisper under my heart, You know why … “Take it up with the doctor,” I said aloud, and turned toward the house.

I got three steps before his fingers closed over my arm. “I plan to,” he said. “But you’re not going anywhere, Miss Wilson.”

I looked down at the hand, the knuckles as tough and brown as walnuts, then up at his face, and said, coldly, “Take your hand off me.”

Phelps shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’re coming with me.”

He hauled me forward. I tried to dig in my heels, but only succeeded in tearing long divots through the pine needles and dead leaves.

“I cannot imagine God approves of this!”

His face might as well have been carved in stone. “I do not approve of what the doctor is doing,” he said coldly. “I never have.”

I twisted my arm back and forth, to no avail, and drew in a breath to scream.

Phelps yanked me close, into a tight embrace, face wedged against the front of his shirt. I smelled sweat and sourness, and my shout came out as a muffled yelp. “You can’t keep the Devil locked up,” he said. “I told him.”

He adjusted his grip, clamping a hand over my face. I thrashed uselessly.

“If you’d just told everyone what you saw…” Phelps said, almost plaintively, as he dragged me deeper into the woods. “If you’d just told everyone then, I would’ve been glad. It could have been over.”

I kicked violently at his shins. I might as well have been kicking a tree for all the good it did. Phelps didn’t even slow down.

When we came in sight of the shed, I thought I might be sick from sheer terror.

It was just bugs, just Halder’s bugs, that was all that was in there, the rest was a hallucination, it wasn’t real— (Phelps thinks it’s real) When he stopped in front of the door, he locked one arm around my neck to hold me in place and reached for the key. I clutched at his arm, feeling half strangled. “Phelps!” I hissed. “We can still tell everyone! We’ll go together—we’ll tell the sheriff—”

His sigh briefly pressed his rib cage against my shoulders and the back of my neck. “It’s too late now, Miss Wilson,” he said. “You should have said something before. They might have hanged me, yes. I accept that. But the Devil would have finally been burned.” He yanked the door open.

If he got me inside, I might never get out again. I planted my feet again, futilely. “Mister Phelps,” I said, as calmly as possible, as if we were having a conversation, “I believe the Lord never sends us more than we can handle.”

That was a lie, incidentally, but astonishingly, it seemed to work. He stopped, one hand on the door, one still around my neck. I could feel the side of his face against my forehead and the rake of stubble across my skin.

“We can handle this together,” I said, fighting to sound as if this were normal. “Just talk to me.”

It was so close. I could see him thinking about it. But he shuddered and said, “I’ll wire the doctor,” then whipped his arm off my neck and thrust me through the door. I tripped over the lip and staggered into the drape, hands out, trying to keep from falling down the stairs. The door slammed behind me.

“The doctor will know what to do,” he said, his voice muffled through the metal.

I beat my hands against the door. “Phelps! Phelps, listen to me!

Whatever you’re afraid of—”

“There’s a beekeeper bonnet on the peg,” he said. “That kept them off before. I’ll bring you food later.” And then, almost too quietly to hear, “I’m sorry, Miss Wilson. Hanging’s one thing, but I won’t let the Devil take me.

Not like this.”

What was he talking about? What did he know that I didn’t? The beekeeper’s bonnet—yes, all right, I could understand that, if there were botflies down here, that might help—but what Devil was he referring to?

I shouted the questions at him and more, pounding my fists against the door in the dark, alternately threatening and pleading, begging for him not to leave me alone, but all I heard was silence. Phelps was gone, and I was alone in the dark with the shadows of my delirium.

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