Wolf Worm — Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

“I am,” said the man chained to the table, “though I fear you have the advantage of me.” Another hoarse, clicking chuckle.

“Sonia Wilson,” I said automatically, and my brain was so far gone from normal matters that I actually thrust out my hand to shake. We both stared at it, and then I said, “Oh hell, I’m bad at this,” and pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling tears start to threaten again. (You’d think being in mortal peril would eliminate any sense of social awkwardness, but apparently it just means that you get to spend the last moments of your life embarrassed.) “It’s not something you get good at,” Saul said.

A fly buzzed somewhere in the room and I hastily shook my sleeve back down over my hand. “I looked at your manacles,” I said. “I don’t know if I can break them.” They were great heavy things, the locks welded shut with rust. I doubted that my faithful enamel pan would be able to smash through them.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea right now,” he said, somewhat cryptically,

and closed his eyes again.

“It can’t be very comfortable.”

“It’s not.”

I swallowed. My mouth felt dry, but it was probably nothing compared to his. “Are you thirsty? I have a little water left.”

“Keep it.”

“I have most of a biscuit—”

“No.”

This was beginning to remind me of when my father was dying. I would ask if he needed anything—tea or fresh pillows or more blankets, anything

—because dying was too large and I couldn’t fix it but at least I could make tea. Toward the end, he had wanted less and less, and eventually I realized that I was just trying to make myself feel as if I was helping him.

Except that my father had pneumonia, and Saul Gregor was chained to a table, and the two weren’t similar at all, were they?

I started digging again. Digging I understood.

“Are you real?” asked Saul abruptly.

I had a mad urge to deny it, but that would have been cruel. “I’m pretty sure I am,” I said, and didn’t add: not as sure as I was a few hours ago. It would have been much easier not to be real. If I wasn’t real, none of this was real either, and that made a lot more sense than a world where it was.

Another scoop of clay hit the ground. The hole was definitely real though. My shoulders wouldn’t ache so badly if it wasn’t.

“Sorry,” said Saul quietly. “One gets these ideas…”

“Yes, of course.” Lying down here in the dark, one had to imagine all sorts of things. “I don’t blame you.”

He lapsed into silence again. I tried to think of something else to say, and settled on, “Everybody thinks you’re dead.”

“Do they?” Saul sounded only mildly interested.

“The story is that Dr. Halder shot you while you were running away with Louisa.”

That got his attention. Wires rattled, jerking my gaze back to him. He actually lifted his upper body a little way up, maybe half an inch, before collapsing back. “Louisa. Is she…?” He swallowed, tried again. “Does

Halder mistreat her still?”

“What?” I asked blankly.

“What is he doing to her?” Saul shouted, and the flies all took flight from his face, buzzing around in a panicky cloud of black and gold.

“He doesn’t do anything,” I said. “She got away. Ma Kersey and the rest, they got her away.”

An idea was starting to form in my brain. It explained everything quite neatly. It just happened to be impossible, which was a definite strike against it.

“Away?” Saul stared at me, his eyes flat and oddly reflective in the lantern light, like coins. “Away where?”

“I don’t know. Ma Kersey wouldn’t tell me. She didn’t want Halder to find out and go looking, since I guess they’re still legally married. I’ve never met her.”

I heard an odd, jagged little snap, and looked down to see that Saul had clenched his hand into a fist. Two fingernails had broken off and a third had torn partway free.

The idea poked me again. I shoved it back down. A hypothesis is no good if it requires the impossible as a condition. If you don’t know how an orchid is pollinated, there’s no point in suggesting that fairies do it, even if that would explain everything neatly. (how long does it take fingernails to grow like that?) “You’re sure?” Saul said. “You’re sure he’s not keeping her prisoner somewhere?”

I considered this. It’s impossible to prove a negative, of course, but this didn’t seem like a good time for that particular discussion. “I’m pretty sure.

Mrs. Kent would never allow that to go on.”

“Rose Kent…” Saul breathed. “No, she wouldn’t.” He sagged, his fingers falling slack once more. The two broken nails were floating on the surface of the water like chitinous leaves. Raw sienna mixed with white, a wash of Payne’s gray for the shadows … I looked away.

“He lied,” Saul said, and began to laugh again, louder this time, an awful throat-tearing sound that was too much like his scream, the same dreadful sawing violin note. “The bastard lied to me. Oh god, Louisa!”

“Please stop,” I whispered, my hands clamped over my ears. In another room, that laugh would have echoed, but here it sank into the muffling burlap and that was somehow worse, as if the laugh was still there, burrowed into the walls, waiting to pupate into something worse. “Please, please stop.”

To my surprise, he did. It took longer for the laugh to die away inside my head. I slowly lowered my hands, feeling foolish. It’s just a laugh, what’s wrong with you?

“I’m sorry,” Saul said. “It’s just that I’ve spent so long thinking he still had her. He said he did. That he kept her locked up, painting pictures. I kept picturing it … and now … now I find out it was lies all along…”

The idea needled me again, more insistently. “How long?” I asked.

“How long have you been down here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His smile was ghastly. “How long has it been since he shot me?”

There, you see? It does explain everything!

It’s still impossible. No one could live this way for that long. He’d have rickets and bedsores and … and … it’s just not possible.

“Over a year,” I said.

“About that, then,” said Saul Gregor.

“That’s not possible,” I said in a shaky voice. “You can’t have—no one could survive—”

“Believe me, I didn’t want to.” He gave me a wry look. “I’d beg you to kill me, if I thought it would take.”

I stared at him, not understanding the words, wondering if his mind had slipped. That happens to prisoners sometimes, doesn’t it? Who could blame him? Maybe it only seemed like a year. Maybe … The long nails floated by on the surface of the water, like little boats.

“Look, you can’t have been down here that long,” I said, hearing myself use the schoolteacher voice, as if I had caught one of the girls in an obvious lie. “You would have rickets.” (I don’t know why my mind settled on rickets as the problem. In my defense, I was not at my best.) Saul stared at me. I swept my eyes down his body, looking for signs of brittle bones, realized how ridiculous that was, and looked away. I’d forgotten he was nude. It hadn’t bothered me when he was an anonymous body, but now that he had a name, it seemed indecent.

“I probably do,” he said finally. “I’ve had everything else by now.”

Oh god, the man was lying on a bed of wires with botfly larvae dangling from his back, and I was lecturing him that he hadn’t suffered correctly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, mortified. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“The screwworms were the worst,” he said, almost dreamily. “The botflies come out so easily, but the screwworms don’t. He practiced digging them out over and over, trying to get the trick of it.”

Halder had bragged about his monograph on the best way to remove screwworms. I pressed my hand over my mouth. It must have seemed like a century. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Saul was quiet for so long that a fly landed on the side of his face. I picked up the pan and flung myself at the hole again, trying to drive out the

mental image of the jar on Halder’s desk, the hundreds of screwworms packed together. Surely they could not all have come from Saul’s flesh.

That wasn’t possible either.

Surely.

I hit a stone and began prying at it with my fingers, trying to tug it loose.

“How did you end up in Halder’s ill graces?” Saul asked abruptly.

“Too much curiosity.” Briefly I outlined how I’d come down and gotten caught.

“Ah. I am sorry to hear that … Miss … Wilson, was it?”

“Yes. Halder’s supposed to be coming back,” I added. “I suppose when he does, he’ll shoot me too.” I did not want to think about the alternative, that I might wind up on a wire rack of my own, my flesh colonized by maggots to appease a dreadful curiosity.

“Perhaps,” Saul said. “He stopped being interested in me a while ago, I think. I don’t know how long. I was hoping he might let me die.”

There was nothing I could say to that. A just god would not allow anyone to be trapped like this, but even an unjust one ought to strike me down if I uttered some platitude like where there’s life, there’s hope to a man in Saul Gregor’s position.

I was spared the necessity of an answer when we both heard it. A scrabbling sound in the hole, coming down toward the room.

I stepped back quickly, skirt dragging through the water. Saul shuddered.

“Whatever that is, Miss Wilson, I’d take it as a favor if you didn’t let it near me.”

It was a rabbit, and not a very large one at that. The Chatham rabbits would be embarrassed to claim kinship. It fell clumsily out of the hole, hit the water, splashed helplessly for a moment, then finally heaved itself up on the pile of bodies. With its fur plastered down, it looked smaller than the squirrel had. There was a single large warble under its left ear.

It made a jump for the table, couldn’t reach, and fell back. It lay as if stunned for a moment, then slowly dragged itself back to its feet.

“Please,” said Saul.

I will not be afraid of such a wretched creature. I will not.

I grabbed a piece of burlap, wrapped it around my hand, and reached down to pick it up by the scruff of the neck. It weighed almost nothing.

The rabbit kicked feebly once, then dangled from my hand, panting.

White showed all around its eye, though it didn’t seem to be focusing on me at all. I fancied I saw a ripple through the skin of the warble.

Now what?

I had never even killed a chicken for dinner. I steeled myself, waded to the far corner where the water was deepest, and held it under the surface of the water. It struggled briefly—very briefly—then went limp.

It must be a better death than having your guts bitten out. I knew that was true. It made no sense that my vision was going blurry.

I held it down long after I was sure that it was dead, because I wasn’t sure if I could do this twice. The warble began to pulse more frantically, squirming as it too drowned, and I gritted my teeth and kept holding the poor limp body underwater until nothing was moving at all.

“I’m sorry,” said Saul, as I laid the sodden rabbit on top of the others.

“Yeah,” I said. I scrubbed at my eyes with my sleeve. I was being foolish. “It’s fine. It’s not fine, but … it’s fine.” I took a deep breath.

“They’re trying to feed you, aren’t they? The flies.”

Saul nodded.

“How? Why?”

“I believe they figured out that I was starving to death.”

I shook my head. “No … I mean, how? They’re insects. Some of them feed their own young, but feeding you? Why would they do that?”

“Because they don’t want me to die, I assume. Much as I might wish to.”

I paused. “Oh. That’s why you want them to stop, then.” Silly me, thinking that it might be because it was horrible to bite into a live squirrel.

“Yes. They feed on me and now they feed me, but I don’t…” He trailed off and began coughing, a dry hack as if something was trapped in his throat.

“Can’t you just … not eat what they bring?” I asked, when he had finally quieted.

Saul sighed. “If you were dying of thirst and someone poured water in your mouth, could you keep from swallowing?”

It seemed to me like there was a significant difference between swallowing a mouthful of water and eating a rodent down to the backbone, but what do I know? All I could do was offer him my extra biscuit, and he’d already turned that down.

“It’s just that what they’re doing makes no sense.” I started hacking at the hole again. “Wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars so that the larvae have something to eat, but they don’t start feeding the caterpillar.”

“And I’m the caterpillar?” Saul gave another clicking chuckle. “These are … special, I think.”

I paused for a moment. Certainly they were enormous, and I hadn’t looked too closely at one. Were they a different species than the ones I’d drawn? Something that showed unusual behaviors?

It wasn’t hard to imagine Halder hearing of a strange new species and deciding to test it out on someone he despised. Someone that had been in his power. If he’d shot Saul and Saul hadn’t died outright … yes, I could see that.

“Did he ever say anything about them? About the species?”

Saul’s lips twisted. “He might have. I can’t say that I was always in the most receptive mood to listen. I know he kept bringing new ones down.

Most of them died, until finally some didn’t. But even if they weren’t special before, they are now.”

I started digging again. I was becoming very fond of this hole. When I got out of here, perhaps I would give up being a naturalist and just dig holes for a living.

No, I probably wouldn’t, because even now I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Special how?”

Saul was silent for a few minutes. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I hit another rock and started prying at it, but only succeeded in bending the edge of the pan.

“They’ve fed on me,” he said at last, clear reluctance in his voice. “I don’t know what that would do. It doesn’t usually happen that way.”

It was my turn for silence. The rock was at least the size of my head. I excavated around the edges, turning those words over in my mind, trying to make them fit, and eventually gave up. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“It changes things. They’re different now, I think. They grow faster, anyway.” He said something I didn’t quite catch, that might have been “same as us,” or “shame on us.” One of the two, anyway.

“That smacks of Lamarckism,” I told him primly, getting my hands around the rock at last. I braced my foot on the wooden board and threw my

weight against it. The rock popped loose unexpectedly and I dropped it, because the alternative was to have my fingers smashed, and fell back into the water with a splash.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Cold water spread through my skirt and my drawers. I stood up, slapping futilely at my dress. Saul snorted with laughter.

“Thank you,” he said, as I attempted to wring out the soggy folds. “This is the best entertainment I’ve had since Phelps lost hold of a chicken a few months ago.”

“So glad I could amuse,” I said coldly. I was starting to think that Saul Gregor wasn’t the nicest person. On the other hand, being wired to a table for a length of time that was almost certainly not a year couldn’t be good for one’s personality. “So the chickens were for you.” I had been pretty sure, but it was nice to have confirmation.

“Yes.” His amusement faded. “Halder figured out that birds were better than animals for his purposes.”

I had a pedantic urge to lecture him that birds were also animals and the word he wanted was mammal, but I squelched it. “What purposes?”

“Keeping me alive. Barely.”

I had no idea how either one was keeping him alive. I pictured him biting into a chicken instead of a squirrel. No, the feathers would get in the way, wouldn’t they? Although the fur should have as well … “What’s the difference?”

My skirts were as wrung out as they could get, which arguably gave us something in common. My drawers stuck clammily to my skin. I felt unpleasantly as if I had wet myself.

“Oh no,” Saul said softly. “Halder won’t win that easily.”

“Huh?” I looked up, but he had pressed his lips together and turned his eyes to the ceiling.

Fine. Be that way. I tested the board again with my shoulder, and thought I felt a very slight give, but now the damn rock was in the way, and it was too large to fit through the gap. I cursed under my breath. Saul continued to say nothing.

I was not going to get angry. I wasn’t. You don’t get angry at people who have been imprisoned and tortured. You just don’t. Even if they are being weirdly cagey about things that might be important. They are obviously not

responsible for acting oddly under the circumstances, and getting angry is counterproductive and … oh. Hmm. I had apparently just knocked a chip out of the pan by bashing it against the rock. Hard.

“You may be exactly what you say you are,” said Saul abruptly. “But Halder has been trying to pry things from me for a long time, and I haven’t … I think I haven’t … told him anything. If putting you in here with me is his way of trying to trick me, I’m not falling for it.”

It was the hesitating “I think I haven’t” that made my anger fall back and slink away in shame. God only knew what Halder had done to him, and if I thought my delirium had made me an unreliable observer, how must Saul feel?

Besides, what would knowing do to help me? It certainly wouldn’t get us out of this shed any more easily.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said. “Unless you know a better

way to dig.”

“Sorry.”

I scraped out more dirt and dumped it atop the dead animals. It occurred to me that this had to be quite recent, because Phelps would surely have noticed the growing pile of corpses. “So they haven’t been feeding you

long,” I said. “The flies, I mean.”

“No. Not long.”

I scrubbed at my face and only barely stopped myself from tearing a hole in the netting trying to scratch. “Maybe it’s more like ants and aphids than caterpillars.”

Saul turned his head to look at me. The flies had settled again, but he didn’t seem to notice and I pretended not to. “Ants?”

“Some ants keep aphids. Ant cows. They feed the ant cows and then the ant cows excrete a substance that the ants eat.”

“I don’t know if being an aphid is much better than being a caterpillar.”

“I’d much rather be an aphid. The aphids aren’t being devoured from the inside out.”

Saul stared at me. His eyes were pale green in the lamplight, and their expression was suddenly so cold and empty that I realized just how supremely tactless my statement had been. I began to stammer out an apology when the door to the shed slammed overhead.

Both our heads jerked up. I thought, No, wait, it’s too soon, the lantern hasn’t burned down, it’s still daylight—and then Phelps came down the stairs, saw us both, and shouted, “Get away from him!”

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