Wolf Worm — Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

I would like to tell you that I was brave and practical and resourceful, that I immediately took stock of my situation and began plotting my escape. But in truth, I slid down the wall to the floor, put my head against my knees, and began to sob.

It was all simply too much. I had been anxious and fearful and then I had been horribly ill and then I had been attacked and now I was imprisoned.

Even that was far too much to bear, without even considering what lay in

wait at the bottom of the steps.

You can’t keep the Devil locked up.

I shoved the thought aside. Not important right now. What’s important is getting out.

The door wasn’t going to open. I wasn’t going to be able to break it down without tools of some sort. My best hope would be if someone came looking for me. Someone other than Phelps, obviously.

I forced myself to think logically. Neither of the Kents were likely to wander by the shed on their own. Sally certainly wouldn’t. Once they knew I was missing, they would definitely look for me though. But when would that be?

Probably not until I don’t come down to dinner. Mrs. Kent will check to make sure I haven’t fallen ill again. By that time, Phelps will probably be long gone.

Had Jackson seen us talking? It was possible. He’d been busy, and we’d been on the other side of the grounds. He could have looked up at the right moment and seen Phelps and I walking away together, but I couldn’t count on it.

All Phelps had to do was claim that he hadn’t seen me. Hell, if I were Phelps, I’d pretend to be worried and join in the search, and take the woods right here so that nobody else could hear me yelling.

Mrs. Kent would suspect Phelps of having something to do with it, but what could she do? This was still North Carolina and she’d be a Black woman accusing a white man of something, without any proof to offer the authorities.

Panic tried to rise in my throat. I studied it as dispassionately as I might a specimen I was preparing to paint. Phelps had said he was waiting for Halder. Even if no one found me, I had only to wait until the doctor’s return.

Granted, he had already spent a week in Raleigh, but he must be due to return soon. He had only the one specimen, and Jackson hadn’t caught any others. I just had to wait until this unexpected research angle had run its course.

The panic tried to rise again, more strongly. That could take weeks.

Father had once become so obsessed with carnivorous sundews from the Sandhills that he spent three months there, sending occasional letters to reassure me that he was fine, and only the onset of winter had actually driven him home.

I tried to imagine spending months in the shed and felt a sob wrack my body like a blow.

No, no. Phelps is not going to keep you here for months. He said he’d wire Halder to tell him there’s a problem.

When Halder gets back, surely he’ll see this is ridiculous.

Surely.

I found that I wasn’t as sure of that as I had been a few hours ago.

I stretched out my hand and touched the heavy drape in front of me.

Somewhere, down in the dark, was something that Halder wanted to keep hidden. Something that Phelps was helping him keep hidden.

Something that he thought he’d hang for.

You know what it has to be. The body must have been real. Not a hallucination brought on by malaria, but a real thing that I had seen and

then tried to convince myself I hadn’t.

But … No “but”s! Think!

The memory was blurry, as if I’d poured water over a painting and left only the ghosts of colors behind, but it hadn’t vanished. Dreams fade, but this hadn’t. On some level, I must have known that, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to convince myself that I hadn’t.

Why had I been so desperate to believe that it wasn’t true?

Because it was horrible. Because it was frightening.

My lips twisted. No. That hadn’t been the reason, not really.

Because you would have had to do something about it.

I had talked myself into continuing to work for a man I knew was a murderer. But there was a difference between hearing gossip and

discovering an actual corpse— (if it was really just a corpse) —being kept in a shed. So I had seized on an explanation that explained it away, that allowed me to keep doing the work I wanted so much to do. I had fallen into relief the way that some people fall into love, and let it blind

me.

Of course, the malaria probably helped.

I laughed, even if it came out half a sob. Yes, the malaria had helped. I had seen things that couldn’t possibly be real, which made it easier to dismiss everything else. Even now, I wasn’t entirely certain of what I had seen. The body, yes, the flies … probably … but surely not all of it could have been real. It defied imagination.

And why would Phelps be so afraid of a corpse? Defiling a dead body was a crime, but it certainly wasn’t a hanging offense, unless you were the one who had made the body dead in the first place.

Could that be the secret? Was Phelps killing people for the doctor to experiment on? I tried to imagine Phelps doing something so obviously sinful and couldn’t. Then I tried to imagine Phelps killing people he thought

were sinners, and that was much easier.

There’s a way to find out, you know.

I wiped my tear-slicked face. I still had the matches that I had put in my apron days ago, and the candle that had condemned me.

Stop sniveling. Quit telling yourself stories and go look.

Light flared up under my hands as I struck a match. I found the beekeeper’s veil on the peg where Phelps had said it would be. It was the one I’d seen before, that I’d thought looked like a lady’s hat. That certainly

argued that there were insects down below. Probably I hadn’t completely hallucinated that either. (black-and-yellow flies buzzing against your skin) I set the candle down and pulled the veil on, then unbuttoned my collar and shoved the gauzy fabric down into my shirt. It probably looked ridiculous, but I was far past caring about that. Nothing should be able to crawl under it this way.

Now go down the stairs and find out what’s real.

The water level had subsided somewhat, or perhaps it had never been as deep as I thought. When I stepped down onto the boards, sediment puffed up from underneath and diffused through the water like smoke. The burlap sacks that lined the walls were stained green with algae and had turned black near the bottom. Had I noticed that before? I couldn’t remember.

The wooden table was as I remembered it. Enamel pan, rusted forceps. I took a deep breath and lifted the candle, looking toward the back of the

room.

My throat closed up.

I had expected the body. I truly had. I had even expected the flies crawling on the dead man’s face. And I had also expected that my memory of it was not perfect, that the fever had warped my perceptions.

But I had not expected reality to be so very, very different.

Memory said the corpse was a brown mummified husk, but memory had lied. This man was only recently dead, his skin ghastly blue-white. He was monstrously thin, but the hollows in his ribs were those of hunger, not of skin sealed against bone. As I watched, a black-and-yellow fly crawled across them, reaching the summit of a rib and then descending into the valley beyond.

I swept the candle flame from side to side, my horror giving way to a deeper bafflement. Could I have truly been that wrong? (you’re always lying to yourself) hissed my anxiety.

Stop that, answered the cool scientific voice. This has nothing to do with you. That body is fresh. It cannot have been here for a week.

I sniffed cautiously, smelling algae and clay and still air. Was there a trace of rot? I thought there was, but not nearly a week’s worth. The underground room might be significantly cooler than the outside air, but it wasn’t remotely cold enough to keep a body fresh.

My eyes swept down the body to his hands. I had been almost certain that the impossibly long nails were hallucinatory, but I had been wrong.

They still looked more like brittle, distorted claws than fingers. And there were the manacles, which I had very much hoped were a dream, and the wire mesh table, and … I closed my eyes for a moment, told myself that I was a naturalist and not squeamish, then leaned over and looked underneath the wire mesh.

Pale flesh hanging like grapes, stretched around the bodies of insect larvae. Oh god, not a dream at all. I forced myself to look, to compare it with my memory, and here it seemed that delirium had exaggerated, because my mind had screamed that there were masses of the things, dozens of bloated warbles larger than my fists, and there were not quite so many as that.

Oh good. Merely horrific instead of apocalyptic. How nice.

I straightened hastily. The room lurched a little and I looked away from the body and stared at the ordinary wooden table until it steadied again.

Well. Now I knew … something. But what?

Think logically. Assemble your evidence.

If the body was fresh, what did that mean?

What if this wasn’t the corpse I had seen? Phelps must have brought it here in the last day or two. That would explain why he had been so alarmed by what I had seen, and why he believed that he would hang for it.

That would mean that he and Halder have been killing people. Possibly

lots of people. (oh god) (Halder won’t let me out if he thinks that I know, I’m going to die down here, they’re going to shackle me to that table and put botflies in me and—) The cool voice was back again, driving the sudden panic aside. That is one possibility, yes. What is the evidence against it?

My eyes were drawn back to the gruesome fingernails. Surely there were not two men with nails like that in Chatham County. There might not be

two men like that in the Carolinas. This must be the same man that I had seen before.

Which could only mean … he had not been dead.

My memory of the corpse speaking, the part that I had dismissed utterly, had been true.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is that possible?

Of course it was possible. I had remembered the manacles and the nails

and the wire table, hadn’t I? (botflies don’t live in dead flesh) The candle flame wavered as my hands shook. Oh god. If I hadn’t convinced myself otherwise, could I have saved him?

And then, in a whisper like a drop of water falling into a cold pond, Are you sure that he’s really dead now?

I stared at the man on the table for a long time. I had to put the candle down because my hands would not stop shaking. Part of me knew that it was reckless to burn down my only source of light, but the panic had finally broken through my defenses.

It was not the kind of animal terror that sends you fleeing into the woods or that makes you beat your hands against a door until you collapse. It was the hard savage kind that knots up under your breastbone and makes it hard to breathe and what fills your head is the knowledge that you will have to do something about it.

It is terrible to be helpless, but it can be equally terrible to be the one who is supposed to be able to help.

The thought came to me that Ma Kersey had probably felt this way many, many times, and somehow that was steadying.

“Right,” I said. My voice sounded high-pitched and shaky, but it still sounded like me, and that was worth something. I had watched my father drown in his own bed. This was worse, but it was still only dying, and I had faced dying before.

He can’t be alive. You’d smell piss and shit if he’d been down here a week. He must be dead.

I had to be sure.

“Can you hear me?” I asked.

There was no reply. A fly buzzed past me, shadow and gold.

“Please, if you can hear me, say something.”

Silence.

“Right,” I said again.

I did not want to touch that waxy flesh with my bare hands. Even if he was cold, that wouldn’t prove anything. There were cases of people buried alive who had been cold when they went in the ground.

I could not see that the man was breathing, but if it was very shallow, I might not see it, particularly not by candlelight. I had no mirror to put in front of his nostrils, and the thought of laying my ear against that bony chest and listening for a heartbeat under the buzz of disturbed flies … I shuddered. Perhaps, if there was no other choice, but there was something else to try first.

I pulled one sleeve protectively down over my hand, steeled myself, and waved away the flies on the man’s face. Most of them buzzed up angrily, bumping against the fabric of my gown. One blundered into the protective mesh in front of my face and clung there, a blurry shadow too close to bring into focus. I batted it away, heard myself moan, and thought, Stop that.

Whimpering won’t help.

Then I thought, Oh shut up, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, whimper if it makes you feel better.

One fly remained, crawling sluggishly across the man’s upper lip. I lifted my arm to bat at it again, realized that it might try to escape up his nostrils, and whimpered again without guilt.

Then I set a fabric-covered finger against his eyelid and pulled it back.

For a moment, I stared into a dark hole of pupil, and then it contracted down to a pinprick in the light of the candle.

I jumped back. The candle flame went out and I knew that I had to light a match and get it going again, but even doing that much seemed, momentarily, impossible. I leaned against the wooden table in the dark,

overwhelmed.

He’s alive.

He’s still alive.

I hadn’t failed him—but now I had to get both of us out of here.

How long had the man been here?

How long does it take for someone’s fingernails to grow like that?

I shook my head in the dark. No. That was impossible. It would take years and no human could survive for years like that. The length of time hardly mattered though. To do this to someone for even five minutes would be monstrous.

Halder has been feeding him, not the insects. Except that the insects are feeding on him, so … I blundered away, hearing the boards squelch under my feet. I had to sit down for a minute and get myself together. When I found the stairs, I climbed up and sat, still clutching the warm candle in nerveless fingers.

My great interest, Miss Wilson, is in parasitic and necrophagic species.

It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them.

But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.

Study them he had, in his own back garden. I had pictured cages of animals infected with botfly larvae and recoiled, but it had never occurred to me that Halder might have used a human model.

But why? Why would you do that? It’s so dangerous and for what? Why would anyone risk getting caught just to use a human?

And then something that had been slowly growing on my consciousness finally intruded, and I realized that while I was sitting there, the blackness had become more of a deep, deep gray and I could make out the edges of the table in front of me.

My eyes couldn’t possibly have adjusted. This was the kind of pitch blackness that you found in deep caves. And yet there was light coming from somewhere, the smallest hint of it, somewhere near the back, against one wall. I could just barely see the edge of a sheet of burlap, a square of black against the faintest edge of illumination.

My heart leapt. Could there be another way out? A door hidden behind the wall? An escape?

Something scrabbled on the far side of the room. I saw movement and heard a muffled thump, followed by a splash.

I shot to my feet, and at that moment, the man said, in a painful rasp, “Please … no … don’t let them…!”

Another scrabbling sound. My brain was full of the possum trying to get through my bedroom door, the possum that had a botfly in its brain oh mother of God, I’d almost forgotten about those. Except that I could get away, even if only to the top of the stairs, and the man chained to the table couldn’t.

Cold determination settled on me, like a glaze of winter frost. I hadn’t saved the dying man when I might have, so whatever happened to him now was my fault. So do something about it.

My hands didn’t shake as I struck one of my few remaining matches.

Part of me was screaming with terror and wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and weep, but I didn’t have time for that now. I locked her away in a shed of her own and lit the candle.

Did I have anything that could be used as a weapon? My boots might serve if nothing else did. I swept my gaze over the room and spotted the enamel pan. Not heavy, but better than nothing. I picked it up, waiting.

With a scratch of claws, the intruder leapt up onto the man’s prison bed.

The wavering candle light revealed … a squirrel?

Gray fur, long brushy tail. Unmistakably a squirrel. It turned its head slightly, light glinting off one dark eye, and I saw the back of its head was strangely distorted, much too long. I didn’t even need to see the dark circle of a botfly to know what had happened. It made a perverse sort of sense.

Cuterebra emasculator. Squirrel botfly.

Relief bolstered my resolve. I was pretty sure I could fend off a squirrel, no matter what was wrong with it. I lifted the pan and took a step forward.

“No!” said the man miserably, turning his face away.

I hesitated. Was he talking to me? Was I not supposed to protect him or…?

The squirrel flung itself across the man’s face, belly down. For a bizarre moment, I thought that it was trying to smother him and rushed forward,

splashing through the shallow water.

Then I heard the crunch.

Blood poured over the man’s chin. His throat worked spasmodically. The squirrel’s body seemed to collapse but it made no effort to escape. It didn’t even show any signs of pain. It simply stared at me with bright black eyes while the man bit and swallowed and bit and swallowed and red crept over his cheeks and dripped through the wire mesh below.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t recoil. I stopped dead and simply stood, holding the candle and my makeshift weapon, and watched. My mind was a hollow silence.

At last, the squirrel pulled away. It was impossible for it to walk—it was cored to the backbone, like a watermelon eaten clear to the rind—yet walk it did. It crawled off his face and then it fell off the side and landed without a sound.

I circled the prison bed and saw, in the shadows there, a half dozen small bodies. Squirrels, mostly. A rabbit. Something on the bottom that was probably a groundhog. None of them more than a day or two old, all sporting the slack, bloody pockets of discarded warbles. Much later, I would think they were probably the source of the faint rot I had smelled, but in the moment, I have no memory of thinking anything at all.

The newest body lay draped across the others. It wasn’t breathing, but then, it had nothing left to breathe with. It was dead. It had to be dead.

You thought that he was dead too.

It was the first thought to cross my mind in a full minute. It lay in isolation inside my skull, like a specimen pinned to a card.

The warble on the back of the squirrel’s head began to pulse, and the thought went away again.

It did not take long for the larva to emerge. The thing was at least two inches long, so large in comparison to its host that it seemed impossible that it had been contained within the rodent’s skin. I watched it thrash free of the skin cocoon and lay still for a moment, as if exhausted. It was dark brown, its slug-like body divided into fat segments, the surface stippled instead of smooth. I had labored for hours getting that stippling just right. Ah, I thought inanely, the preservative did wash the color out. I will have to repaint it.

From illustrating the life cycle of the fly, I knew that its next move would be to burrow into the leaf litter and pupate. There was no leaf litter here, nor did I intend to give it the chance to pupate. I stepped forward, slid the edge of the pan underneath it, and flipped it into the water.

Its body jackknifed, but it did not sink. I brought down my boot, crushing it against the wet boards, seeing something yellowish puff into the water, before red clay rose up and covered it.

I looked at the man on the table. Blood coated his face and throat, already starting to dry. His eyes were closed. As I watched, tears began to trickle silently over his skin, etching pale tracks into the stain.

What I wanted in that moment was not answers, not explanations, not even freedom. What I wanted was for this not to be happening.

I turned away. I went up the stairs, pulled the drape aside, and sat down in the corner. I pinched out the candle in an effort to save the few minutes of light that I had left. I tucked my hands into my sleeves and pulled my skirt tight so that there was no exposed skin for anything to reach. If I had had a blanket, I would have pulled it over my head to keep the monsters away.

And then, and only then, I let myself think again and stared, dry-eyed and dry-mouthed, into the dark.

I had told Phelps that I believed the Lord only sent us as much as we could handle. That was a lie, but even if I had believed it, I wouldn’t anymore, because this was too much.

Being kidnapped and shoved into a dark hole in the ground was terrible, but I could probably have coped with it. Other people have dealt with things like that before. A dying man riddled with parasites was horrible, but by itself, I could have managed. Other people have dealt with things like that as well. The history of the world is written in dying bodies and in those who have to pick up afterwards.

Combining the two was right at my limits, but I had managed. I had been coping.

But the gutted animals—that was simply too far. A merciful god would not have piled that on top of the other two. No one could be expected to deal with all three at once.

And yet, horrified and nauseated and scared out of my wits, I was still a naturalist, and even as I shuddered in the corner, wrapped in a cocoon of fabric, part of me was asking, How did he bite through the fur like that?

How did he swallow the bones without choking?

I could still hear the thin crunch of the squirrel’s ribs giving way. I rested my forehead on my knees and tried to stop hearing it.

I wanted this not to be happening. I wanted the world to be different. I wanted it not to contain horrors.

Useless. “Wish in one hand, shit in the other,” Esther had said once, shocking me. “See which fills up first.” She’d been right though. Might as well wish for a world where your father hadn’t died and left you penniless, or a world where his friends had remembered that you existed.

At last, I did what overwhelmed people have done since time immemorial, and slept.

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