Wolf Worm — Chapter 19

CHAPTER 19

My captor had a much larger lantern in one hand and another basket over his arm. He set the basket down on the step with exaggerated care, reached into his vest, and pulled out a gun.

The barrel winked in the orange light. I stared at it blankly. My brain said Prussian blue and burnt umber for the metal, antimony orange for the reflections. This was not helpful under the circumstances.

“Move away from him, Miss Wilson,” Phelps said, leveling the gun at

Saul. “He’s dangerous.”

“He’s chained to a table.”

“I feel she makes a valid point,” said Saul, sounding as if he were standing in someone’s parlor, not naked and tied to a table. “Don’t you, Phelps?”

The gun trembled. This didn’t make me feel any more confident. A scared man with a gun is much more dangerous than a confident one. What if he shot Saul? What if, after everything, the man bled out in front of me?

And it will be your responsibility if he does, because you didn’t get help that first night.

I would like to say that I thought about what I was doing, that it was an act of considered courage, but it wasn’t. I didn’t really think about what I was doing. I just clutched the pan in front of me with both hands and walked slowly forward, until I planted myself between Saul and the cold eye of the gun.

Phelps bit his lip. He looked awful. His skin looked looser and he seemed to have aged a decade since the night before. His hair stuck out from his skull in ragged clots and his eyes showed white all around the iris.

“Miss Wilson, you need to get away from him.” His voice was pleading now. “I brought you more food and more lamp oil. Knew this one wouldn’t last all day and I hated to think of you down here in the dark. Just … just come over here. Please.”

My nails scraped on the enameled pan as I gripped it more tightly. Would it stop a bullet? Probably not. I didn’t think Phelps would shoot me, but I didn’t want to find out. I took a deep breath.

“What Halder has done to this man is monstrous,” I said. “But we can still make this right. Just help me—”

“He ain’t a man,” snapped Phelps. “Don’t you understand? He’s one of

them.”

“One of what?”

“Devils.” Phelps’s hand twitched and the gun jittered sideways. My flinch must have been visible, because he set the lantern down and took a two-handed grip on the pistol.

Devils? Oh god, was this the shape of his delusion? My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I tried to figure out how to navigate these waters.

“They look like us,” said Phelps, “but they ain’t human. I’ve seen it, Miss Wilson. I know. They’re blood thieves.”

I swallowed. “Mr. Phelps,” I said carefully, “I know that there was a frightening incident a few years back. I know that there were a lot of stories around the … the two people … doing those awful things. But you have to understand that people were whipping themselves into a frenzy. Like a sort of lynch mob. The stories that people made up afterward, they weren’t real.”

Phelps closed his eyes briefly. If I had been closer, perhaps I would have gone for the gun. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. When he opened them again, he was looking at me almost pityingly.

“Miss Wilson, they weren’t just stories. I know you’re educated and think you know better, but I was there. That girl we buried was a devil and I know that for God’s own truth.”

My knuckles were beginning to ache from clutching the pan so tightly, but I couldn’t make them relax. “How do you know, Mr. Phelps? Did Halder tell you? Because—”

“I know,” Phelps interrupted me, “because I killed her twice.”

I am not always the quickest thinker. My response to this dramatic statement was to say, “Err … what?”

Saul made a sound behind me, the faintest huff, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t quite dare.

“There were two of ’em,” said Phelps. He sat down on the step, lowering the gun barrel just a fraction. I didn’t fool myself that he couldn’t snap it back up in a hurry. “Never saw the boy until the end, but I recognized that girl right enough.”

“Oh?” I said. Every minute he’s talking is a minute he isn’t shooting. And it’s daylight, so maybe someone will have seen him.

He nodded. “About six months earlier. Had a couple of shoats penned up. Heard squealing one night and grabbed my gun. Thought maybe a bear decided he wanted a taste of pork. Only it wasn’t a bear.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was that girl. Three pigs dead, with bites taken out of ’em. Lotta bites. Couldn’t quite get through the hide, but she’d kept trying ’til she hit a spot on the throat she could get through. And the fourth one…” He stopped and swiped a hand at his hair, which turned into pawing at the back of his head, a terrible grimace on his face. It reminded me of how a dog will sometimes scratch its ear until it begins to yelp in pain, but doesn’t stop scratching. The gun lurched back and forth and my stomach lurched with it.

“Mr. Phelps—”

He shook himself. “Sorry, Miss Wilson.”

“You should have Ma Kersey look at that again,” I said. “It might be infected.”

Phelps tilted his head, still doglike. “You really don’t know,” he said almost wonderingly.

“As wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove,” Saul said, speaking up for the first time. “You should let her go, Phelps. She’s got no part of this.”

“The Devil quotes Scripture,” Phelps said, his eyes narrowing.

“Shut up,” I hissed to Saul. And to Phelps, more loudly, “You were telling me about the pigs, Mr. Phelps?”

“Oh, aye.” He shook himself. “That fourth pig wasn’t dead. It was sat half in her lap and she was tearing chunks out of its face and it let her do it.”

I was suddenly horribly conscious of the pile of dead animals who had let themselves be gutted. Keep him talking. “That must have been very … ah … unsettling.”

“Yes, Miss Wilson, it was.” With anyone else, I might have suspected sarcasm, but Phelps sounded earnest. “I didn’t know about the devils then. I shot her.”

My eyes dropped down to the gun again. I had been hoping that Phelps had a philosophical objection to shooting women, but apparently I was being thwarted at every turn today.

He gestured with the gun. “Would have been a lot of questions. People would have seen a dead girl and not what she was doing. I was a different person then. I’m not proud of what I did, but I dumped the body in the woods, as far away as I could take her, and hoped nobody’d come looking.

And nobody did.”

I had one unbroken nail left after digging. I felt it break against the metal pan and looked down, bemused, at my own white fingers, as if they belonged to someone else. “Ah,” I said.

Phelps’s gaze was unfocused. I don’t think he was even seeing me anymore, though he’d probably focus quick enough if I moved. “When word came down they’d cornered the devils who did for all those people, I grabbed my gun and went out. And there she was. Exactly the same.”

Things were slotting into place in my head that I didn’t like, all of them just as impossible as Saul having been locked down here for more than a year. Nevertheless, I wasn’t ready to completely abandon reason yet. “It may have simply been a family resemblance or—”

“She recognized me too. Asked if I was gonna shoot her again.”

“You must have been mistaken about—”

“She left half her guts on the floor of my hogpen.”

I stopped talking.

“Hope you didn’t let any of the hogs eat that,” said Saul, with a clicking chuckle.

Phelps had hunched over as he spoke, but now he stood up straight, unfolding himself like a praying mantis. I took a hasty step back and felt my

back bang into Saul’s table. Something landed on the back of my neck and I had a horrible feeling that it was a botfly.

“I told ’em,” Phelps said. “I told ’em that a bullet wasn’t enough. I told ’em those two were devils. They didn’t want to listen, but the preacher finally did. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

Ma Kersey’s description of the dead girl eating clay beat against my brain like a fly trapped in a cup. I lifted my hand, trying not to make any movements that might startle Phelps, and slapped at the back of my neck.

Wings brushed my hand and I shuddered.

“Mr. Phelps,” I said, desperate to keep him talking, “perhaps you’re right. Perhaps that girl had … had a condition unknown to science. But it does not follow—” (thin bones crunching under Saul’s teeth) “—that Mr. Gregor has it as well.”

“Miss Wilson,” Phelps said wearily, as if I were a particularly slow pupil, “I watched the doctor put two bullets in him. One in the knee and one in the back. Both of ’em came out the other side. Look at him now. Do you see any scars?”

I blinked foolishly then turned around, my eyes sweeping over Saul’s prone body. His knees both looked like perfectly ordinary knees. I hastily averted my eyes from his groin, but his belly and ribs were smooth and unmarked by anything but the dark bodies of resting flies.

He must have been mistaken. There’d be enormous scars. He’d never walk again.

Halder missed. Or this isn’t the same man. Or … My gaze continued, inexorably, up to Saul Gregor’s face. He met my eyes and his lips twisted in a small, rueful smile. Then he nodded.

“Really?” I said weakly.

“I could have gotten away if it wasn’t for the knee,” Saul said. “We heal very fast, but even our kind can’t run on a shattered joint.”

Oh.

Say that you were a scientist who studied parasites. There is only so much that you can observe from dead specimens. You need to watch their process through living flesh. But host animals are small and often hard to keep alive, particularly if you wish them to be infested over and over. How often can you pull a screwworm out of a rabbit before it dies of massive infection?

Say that you learned about another kind of human. One who heals at an astonishing rate. One that feeds on blood and viscera and who can endure astonishing hardships.

Say that your wife was about to run away with someone, and you caught them. You shot him and crammed his body into the shed you had once kept animals in, expecting him to die, but instead he healed, and you realized that he was one of these others.

Say that you realized this was the solution to your problem. A subject that would not die, no matter how many holes you put in him, digging screwworms out of his flesh. No matter how many botflies lived beneath his skin. An endless source of material for your studies … assuming that you were willing to commit atrocities that no one should inflict on another living being.

Say that you hated him enough to do it anyway.

“It has been a year then, hasn’t it?” It sounded like my voice, but it must not have been me talking, because whoever it was sounded very calm. I was

certainly not calm.

“Yes,” said Saul.

“And no rickets,” said that calm voice, somewhere off in the distance.

“And no rickets,” Saul said, as if rickets mattered at all, but if I focused on something very small, perhaps I would be able to survive the next few minutes after all.

“Did Louisa know?” It was suddenly very important to me that she had known. If she had, and had loved him anyway … well, I would trust the judgment of a woman who could paint beetles more beautifully than anyone I had ever known.

If she hadn’t—if Saul had lied to her—then I did not know what I was going to do next.

“She knew,” Saul said. I met his eyes and there was no trace of a lie in them.

“He’s a devil!” Phelps shouted, and I jumped. Strange as it sounds, I had, for an instant, forgotten that there was a man with a gun in the room. “He’s a tempter! Don’t listen to him!”

I glanced back at Saul, filthy and gaunt, chained down on his bed of pain. A tempter? Only if pity was a temptation.

“Mr. Phelps…” I began, with no idea how to finish that sentence.

Phelps opened his mouth. At first I thought he was about to speak, but then I saw that he was panting. He scratched at his scalp and winced, pulling his hand away. I thought there might be blood on it, but the light wasn’t good enough to be sure. “Lord have mercy, it hurts,” he said, almost

to himself.

“Let me help you,” I said.

He shook his head miserably. “No one can help me,” he said, taking another step forward. “‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’”

“It’s driving you now, isn’t it?” asked Saul, almost conversationally. “It wants you to come closer, doesn’t it?”

Phelps nodded his head up and down, quick and jerky. He grabbed for the timbers beside the stairs and clung, one-handed, half turning. I caught a glimpse of the back of his head.

His scalp was raw and bloody, scored with scratches, and the lump in the middle was crowned with a dark larval circle.

Not a goose egg after all.

I felt no surprise. Either I was numb, or, far more likely, I’d suspected all along but hadn’t let myself think of it. I wondered how far the larva had dug into his brain. It was low on his skull, close to the brain stem. Perhaps it was a miracle he wasn’t paralyzed.

No, no. The wolf worm needs them to be able to walk. It wouldn’t chew through anything vital. Like the wasp larvae in the caterpillar, it keeps its host alive as long as possible so that it can continue to feed.

“Phelps,” I said. “Phelps, it’s just an insect. I watched Halder dissect a possum that had one. I saw what he did. I can get yours out.” (This was a

staggering lie, of course, but if I could just get the gun away from him and get him out of the shed, I could get him to Ma Kersey and maybe we could do something.) His fingers jerked, releasing the timber, and he stumbled forward.

“I think it’s too late, Miss Wilson,” said Saul.

“It takes two weeks for them to reach maturity,” I argued, as Phelps blundered across the floor. “It’s only been a couple of days for him.”

“The ordinary ones, perhaps. But things like us can grow very quickly indeed.”

If a creature like Saul could gestate in human flesh in three months, why should a botfly be any different? What changes had been wrought on the evolution of these insects, down in this dark hollow in the clay?

“Devils,” wept Phelps. He hit the wooden table and fell heavily against it, gasping for breath. “Samson,” he added nonsensically. “Samson.”

If I were braver, perhaps I might have tried to snatch the gun away from him. I didn’t. God knows where the bullet would have ended up, in these close quarters. “Let me help you,” I said again.

He ignored me, sliding along the table as if being dragged forward by an invisible hand. “O Lord, have mercy,” he prayed, taking a jittery step toward Saul, then another. “As you had mercy on Samson, have mercy on me.”

“The Lord has nothing to do with this,” said Saul. There was a new note in his voice, something dark and gloating. I took a step back, then another, as Phelps stumbled in my direction. His pupils were huge and seemed to fill his whole face.

“No,” Phelps said, half begging, his hands stretched out toward me. “No, please, stop it, stop it!”

“I can’t stop it,” I told him, retreating. “I can’t, I can’t, I would if I could!”

It was only the truth. I hated Phelps and I was afraid of him and I still

would not have wished this on him.

“Not long now,” said Saul pleasantly.

Phelps paused, swaying on his feet. “No,” he said, sounding momentarily lucid. “No, it isn’t.”

“Come on, then,” Saul said, his voice deepening and darkening. “Come a little closer. You know you want to. I didn’t want to feed again, but for you,

Phelps, I’ll make an exception.”

The muscles in Phelps’s face twitched and spasmed, but his next words were clear enough. “You think I’ll go alone?”

“You’re alone now,” purred Saul.

“Samson brought … Samson brought the temple…”

I had already retreated until my back hit the wall, but at his words, I started forward. “No!”

“Samson brought the temple down!” Phelps cried, pitching up against Saul’s bed. His arm came up again with the gun pointed at Saul.

Saul screamed in his face.

That horrible sawing-violin shriek would have startled anyone. My heart stuttered in my chest. It drove Phelps back a step and that was enough, that was all I needed. I lunged forward and swung the faithful enameled pan and the angle was bad and I knew it wasn’t heavy enough to knock him unconscious, but maybe he’d drop the gun and I could grab it or maybe there’d be a miracle or maybe the world would end but I had to do something.

It slammed against the back of Phelps’s head and something gave under the blow. Something that felt almost exactly like a grape popping.

Phelps’s back arched and he screamed and pitched forward. He dropped the gun and I dove for it, past his legs, and it vanished into the muddy water. I had a moment of panic that I’d grab it wrong and hit the trigger and shoot myself in the face, but then I felt the cold metal under my hands. I came up with it and scrambled out of the way, just as Phelps’s scream was cut off and replaced by a horribly wet crunch.

I turned.

Phelps’s feet drummed against the floor as he spasmed. He had fallen across Saul, and I did not need to see the red tide pouring across Saul’s chest to know what had happened next.

It occurred to me, very distantly, that the merciful thing to do would be to shoot Phelps now. I looked down at the gun in my hands. I was shaking so hard that my teeth began to chatter and I had to clench my jaw to stop them. If I tried to aim like this, I would probably hit Saul. Saul, who had his face buried in the hollow between the other man’s neck and shoulder.

Would it matter if I shot them both? End it here?

To really end it, you’ll have to burn Saul’s body. Possibly while he’s still alive.

The crunching had changed to something softer and wetter. Phelps had stopped thrashing and lay limp across the table where Saul had been

chained for twelve long months or more.

(he’s not human)

(he’s something else) (a devil) Some things were too monstrous to inflict, even on devils. I lowered the gun.

Phelps’s last breath came out in a long gurgled sigh and was still.

I hit the wall and slid down it, hands over my ears, trying desperately to block out the sounds of Saul Gregor feeding.

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