Wolf Worm — Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

A long time went by, or perhaps it only seemed like a long time. I was cold and wet and the water was full of blood. Flies buzzed through the air, settled, buzzed again. The soft, obscene sounds went on and on, until at last they stopped.

Eventually, Saul released his prey, and Phelps slid off the table and fell facedown into the water. I winced a little at the wet thudding noise the body made when it hit the boards, though I knew he was long past caring.

“I think,” said Saul, stretching as luxuriously as a man who was pinned to a table could, “that it is probably safe to release me now.”

He looked better. A lot better. The hollows in his ribs had filled out completely and there was muscle along his arms now. No one seeing him now would assume that he was dead or dying, and certainly not that he had been down here for an unspeakable length of time.

“Why aren’t you mad?” I asked, thinking about how long that year must

have been.

“Who says I’m not?”

The gun was still in my lap. I picked it up. Saul sighed. “Madness, for most people, is something that happens inside your brain. Something being damaged. But those parts heal like everything else. I would go a little mad for a time, I think, and then they’d toss me some food and the madness would heal.”

I tried to picture what that must have been like and couldn’t.

Red fanned lazily through the water at my feet, a brilliant color that you only get with cadmium and other heavy metals. And blood, of course. Most of Phelps’s blood had gone into Saul, but there was still enough to dye the

water crimson. “This is why you didn’t want me to set you free, isn’t it?

You thought you might do … that. To me.”

“Yes.”

I nodded. “You could have explained that to me.”

Saul gave me an ironic look. “Strangely enough, when you feed primarily on blood and entrails, you don’t go around telling everyone.”

Well, that was fair enough. “You told Louisa though.”

The cords of his neck stood out briefly as he lifted his head, then let it drop. “We could never have children, you see, and she deserved to know

why. But I would have told her anyway.”

“Good.” I pushed myself to my feet.

“I would have dealt with those children too, if I’d been here. Poor doomed souls. I heard rumors about them and came as quickly as I could, but of course it was much too late by then. I might have been able to save

them, if I’d heard about them sooner.”

“Save them?”

“It wasn’t their fault. They were like ducklings raised by hens, with no one to teach them how to swim. It is not easy to be what we are, but there are … ways … to mitigate it. To do as little harm as possible. Not the sort of things a child could work out for themselves. They would have only known that they were not like others, and prey to a monstrous hunger they could not possibly explain.”

I thought of Jackson’s grandmother, telling him tales of blood and hunger, and wondered how many of those tales came from Saul’s people, or from their abandoned children. I would have liked to feel sorry for those doomed three-month babies. Perhaps someday I would.

“Ma Kersey said they were born with sharp teeth,” I said.

“Yes.”

His teeth looked perfectly normal at the moment. I wondered whether the sharper teeth folded back against the roof of his mouth, like a snake’s fangs? No, surely that would affect his speech, give him some kind of lisp, wouldn’t it? Unless the upper palate was significantly deeper or perhaps had a slot for the teeth to fit into … “They’re in my throat,” said Saul, rolling his eyes. “I’d offer to show you, but I don’t want you to run away screaming before you unlock these

things. After that, you can run away screaming whenever you like. I may too, actually.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Are you a vampire, then?”

He made a scoffing sound. “Is a manatee a mermaid?”

“Only if you’re desperate to see mermaids, I suppose.”

“There you go, then.” He pursed his lips. “Incidentally, while this is a fascinating conversation, I suspect I’d enjoy it even more if I wasn’t chained to a table.”

“Right,” I said, setting the gun down on the table and examining the manacles. They were still as unyielding as ever. “I could go out and get a file. No, what am I thinking? I’ll go get Jackson—”

“No!”

I blinked at him. “But the door is open now.”

“I would rather not have anyone see me like this,” said Saul, returning to his former dryness. “Specifically, covered with blood alongside Phelps’s corpse.”

Ah. Quite. “I take it the Kents don’t know, then.”

“Rose knows that there is something odd about me, but not the exact shape of it. I prefer that as few … err … of your people know as possible. It is safer for everyone that way. If you can get me free now, that would be best.” (It occurred to me much later that what Saul actually feared was that I would leave and not come back. But that was later, and my capacity for clearheaded thought was not high at the moment.) Saul looked down at the manacles. “I can probably rip them out, if you remove the nails.”

“Nails?” I looked blankly at his overgrown fingernails.

“There are nails in my forearms,” he said patiently. “Also my shoulders and both shins. They prevent me from pulling my hands and feet out of the manacles.”

I had to brace my forearms against the table for a minute to hold myself up. “Oh.”

Completely logical, of course. You’d need something like that if you were imprisoning someone who knew they’d heal up even if they managed to pulp their own hand yanking it free. Halder had clearly thought things through with monstrous thoroughness.

The nails were placed just behind the wrist bones. Skin had actually grown over the top of the left one, which was probably why I had missed seeing it before. They had been hammered into the wooden cross beams on the table in a horrible parody of crucifixion.

Calm Me took over again, because otherwise I was going to begin screaming and not stop until my lungs gave out. “Right,” I said again. I set my fingers on the right nail, pulled, got exactly nowhere. Saul’s skin was still too cool. Squirrel botflies disliked human hosts because we were too cold. I wondered if these had adapted to a wider range of hosts.

“I can’t get it out,” I said. “Give me a minute.” I prowled the room, trying to find something that I could use as pliers. My eyes fell on the rusted forceps. If they didn’t fall apart when I tried to use them, perhaps that would work.

“I hope I don’t give you tetanus,” I muttered.

“I don’t believe I can get it.”

“Lucky you.” The forceps didn’t want to open at first, but eventually yielded, though not before leaving red handleprints in my fingers. I hooked them under the head of the nail, pulled, got nowhere, started to wiggle them back and forth, then stopped. “Oh god, I’m sorry. That must hurt.”

“Yes, but having you cut my arm off will hurt a lot more.” I froze. Saul’s smile was ghastly. “You don’t want to know what I’ll do to be free of this place.”

I set back to work. After a few seconds, the nail actually slid a little way out of the board and I redoubled my efforts. “Thank god this was here,” I muttered.

“That’s what Halder used to dig the screwworms out,” Saul said pleasantly. And then, “If you keep stopping every time you’re horrified, we’ll never get out of here. My people can die of old age.”

“How … fascinating…” I said through gritted teeth as I worked. A moment later, it came loose from the wood. I could actually feel the— texture? viscosity?—of the flesh change as the nail slid out through gristle and flesh. It was incredibly nauseating, but I told myself that I wasn’t the one with a nail in my arm so I wasn’t allowed to be sick. I leaned on the table and breathed heavily through my nose, then gave a final tug and pulled it free.

Clear fluid seeped through the hole. Saul lifted his forearm as far as he could, flexed it, and nodded. “If we both pull on the manacle now…”

I wrapped more burlap over my hands, grabbed the rusted metal, and pulled with all my strength, while Saul shoved upward.

The metal bolts held. The wood did not. Months of damp took their toll with a splintery crunch. Saul’s arm jerked up, the manacle and a chunk of wood clinging to his wrist like a bracelet.

“Oh god,” he said, with a moan that might have been pleasure or pain or both. “You have no idea how it feels to bend your elbow for the first time in a year.”

I shook my head, moving to the other manacle, but Saul waved me off, reached over, and plucked the nail out of his left wrist as if it were a splinter. The second manacle yielded immediately to his two-handed assault.

It began to occur to me that, manatee or mermaid, Saul was substantially stronger than an ordinary human being.

He flexed both arms, then began calmly snapping the overgrown nails off each hand. I didn’t want to watch, but I did anyway.

Saul had barely finished when he suddenly slapped a hand down against his chest, once, twice, then again. At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing, then I saw the dark smears left behind.

“You little bastards,” Saul said, his voice thick with feeling, and began swatting at the flies on his face. Some buzzed out of range, then began to settle again, and were immediately crushed.

I slid my hands into my sleeves and simply waited. If any man on earth had ever deserved to swat a fly, it was Saul Gregor.

With the flies dead, he lay quiet for a moment. I assumed that he was recovering from the pain. The underside of both arms was a ragged mass of torn skin, and I couldn’t imagine how his joints felt, moving after so long.

“Best done quickly,” Saul said finally—and sat up.

All the flesh that had grown through the wires and hung beneath, filled with the dangling bodies of the botflies, was suddenly yanked back against the mesh. Much of his back simply tore away. In other places, mostly around the edges, pale rags of skin came up, still attached, to dangle in long skeins from his ribs. Warbles swung like grotesque beads, or were forced open and their contents disgorged onto the floor.

The sound was indescribable.

Saul did not scream, but he made a hard, awful sound and sat forward, his breath hissing through his teeth.

The room tilted and darkened around me. I dug my fingers into the wooden tabletop and told myself that I wasn’t the one who had just flayed my own back and I didn’t get to faint. It was a much harder sell this time, but after a moment it worked.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” I croaked, pulling my apron off to staunch the bleeding.

Except there wasn’t any. Or not much, anyhow. Saul’s back was a landscape of pink and yellow meat shot with red, oozing more clear fluid but little else. I could see the white islands of his spine protruding from a skinless sea.

I draped my apron over his back. I can’t swear that it wasn’t just so that I wouldn’t see it any longer.

“Thank you,” Saul rasped, plucking the nails from his legs and tossing them aside. The manacles sheared away from the wood. I looked away before he pulled his thighs loose from the rest of the mesh, but the sound followed me anyway.

Saul stood up, took a staggering step forward, and leaned against the wall. His chest heaved like a bellows. “That was much worse than I expected,” he said, to no one in particular.

I rushed to him, trying to figure out how to support him before he fell over, without touching the horrific ruin of his back. I ended up pulling his arm over my shoulders, trying to take as much of his weight as I could.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. Violent tremors wracked through him. How long did it take for something like this to heal? Would it be five minutes or five days or five months?

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes.” Leaning against me, he managed to take a heavy, leaden step toward the stairs. (This was, incidentally, the first time I’d ever been in a naked man’s embrace. As far as I was concerned, you could keep it.) I cast around desperately for something to distract us both. “Tell me about how you met Louisa.”

“Louisa,” he muttered. “Yes.” Another dragging step. Something lightweight was knocking against my ribs, and I was pretty sure that it was a botfly warble. I deliberately didn’t look, because if I saw it, I would have to scream and Saul needed me to be calm right now.

(wolf worm wolf worm wolf worm) “You met Louisa,” I prompted him.

“Yes. I’d come here … come here … I was looking for the children.

Rumor. I said that, didn’t I? A man told me about ‘blood thieves in the woods,’ but he was drunk. Wasn’t sure if it was one of us or not. When I got here, people told me Halder had been there when they were killed.” I steered him past the wooden table. Water sloshed around his bare feet. My own feet had been cold and wet for so long that I had stopped feeling them

at all.

“So you met with Halder?” I asked.

“Yes.” He put out his other hand and touched the wall, leaning against it.

“Sorry. Need a minute.”

“Yes, of course.” I made certain that he was stable, slid out from under his arm, and picked the lantern up off the stairs. A botfly finished its struggle to emerge from one of the rags of skin and fell into the water with a plop!

“Met her in the house. She came into the room.” He swallowed, and a little of the strain on his face eased. “Like she brought all the light with her.

She was alive and she made you feel more alive just by being there.” He shook his head. “Halder … stupid bastard … didn’t see it. Such a goddamn waste.”

I relocated the lantern and straightened, rubbing my aching shoulder.

“Can you handle the stairs?”

“I think so.” He leaned down and broke off a few toenails. “Phelps did

me that much good, at least.”

I decided not to comment on that.

Half carrying Saul up the stairs wasn’t easy. They were broad, thankfully, but I slipped at least once and would have gone to my knees if Saul hadn’t been there to pull me back.

“We’re almost there,” I told him. “You’re doing good.”

“So are you,” said Saul dryly. “Am I helping you up the stairs or are you helping me?”

“Let’s not get hung up on the details.” I pulled the door open. Judging by the color of the sky, it was early evening, but it seemed extraordinarily bright after my day spent underground. The sound of cicadas droning in the trees made me want to weep with relief. I stepped outside and turned back to make certain that Saul didn’t trip over the lip on the threshold.

That’s when I heard the gun cocking behind me.

“I suggest you keep your hands where I can see them, Miss Wilson,” said Dr. Halder. His gun was smaller than the one Phelps had carried, which I had foolishly left on the table below, but his hand was also a great deal steadier. “Step away from my test subject, if you please.”

“Test subject?”

“He’s a parasite, Miss Wilson.” Halder’s lip curled. “No different than any of the others that I study. Step away, please. I don’t want to tell you again.”

Unlike Phelps, I was pretty sure that Halder wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me. I stepped away. Saul stood framed in the doorway, swaying slightly on his feet. “Halder,” he said.

“You’re looking better, Saul. Been feeding, then? Perhaps on Miss

Wilson, here?”

“I haven’t touched Miss Wilson.”

“Doctor,” I said, thinking that it was just my luck that I would have to negotiate with two men with guns in the same day, and that I hadn’t learned nearly enough the first time. “Doctor, we don’t have to do any of this. Just let us walk away, and we won’t tell anyone. No one would believe us anyway.”

And, God willing, we’ll be out of range when you discover Phelps’s body.

“Don’t be fooled, Miss Wilson,” Halder said. “He may look human, but that’s simply mimicry at work.”

“Mimicry?” I said. Comprehension worked slowly through my brain.

“Like those caterpillars that look like bird droppings?”

“Caterpillars again?” murmured Saul. I shot him a sharp look. Was he not taking this seriously? Of course, if he gets shot, he’ll heal up fine. Some of us aren’t so lucky.

“More like the fireflies that pretend to be females of a different species.

Then they devour the males who respond to their flashes. Saul, don’t even think about it. You know that I’ll shoot your knees out if I must.”

Whatever Saul had been thinking, he must have stopped. I tried again.

“Doctor, Phelps believed in devils, but I know you’re a man of science.

Surely you can’t believe—”

“It is because I am a man of science that I believe, Miss Wilson. I have observed, I have tested, and I know that my logic is sound. This is not a human being. He—it—is a member of a species that evolved to prey upon ours. Darwin himself could not deny it.”

“It doesn’t follow that—”

“Do you know how they reproduce?” asked Halder pleasantly, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Just like wasps, as it happens. They deposit their children inside a woman, and those children devour their host. Just like the wasp, they save the vital organs for last, so that they can grow as large as possible.

I suspect the females have ovipositors for just that purpose, but sadly those fools burned the single female specimen we encountered before I could dissect it.”

“I tracked their father down, if that makes you feel any better,” said Saul, never taking his eyes off the gun. “He won’t do it again. Or anything else either.”

“Which hardly changes the fact that your species requires us as hosts,” said Halder. “You are parasites upon us, in every sense. Without us, you would die out in a single generation.” He gestured with the gun, and both Saul and I twitched. “With the information that I have gathered, I think it likely that they can be eradicated.” He paused, eyes flicking briefly to my

face. “You could help me, Miss Wilson.”

“What?”

Saul’s hand pressed briefly against my back. A message of some sort, I thought, though I wasn’t sure what. “Help you?” I asked.

“Indeed. Phelps assumed that you’d go to the authorities. I think he was wrong. You understand the importance of my work, don’t you?”

I took another half step away from Saul, moving slowly. “It’s very important, yes. Just as you said, if we know enough about screwworms, we can find a way to stop them.”

“Exactly!” The lantern light flashed off his spectacles. “And this, Miss Wilson, is far worse than screwworms. Imagine how many of them there

may be, living among us, devouring us…”

“There aren’t that many,” said Saul.

Halder’s gaze swung back to him. “So you say. But I can hardly trust you, can I?”

I took another step forward and tried to compose my face. It wasn’t easy.

Dealing with Mistress Silverton had been one thing, but she had never held a gun on me. Fortunately, Halder expected me to look horrified. “Are you saying that there are more of them out there? Killing women to … to reproduce?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Miss Wilson. Did you see him feed on Phelps?”

So he suspected Phelps was dead. I didn’t have to fake my shudder. “I did. It was horrible.”

“That bastard deserved it,” growled Saul.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let this be what he wanted me to do. “Would you have done that to me too, if you were hungry enough?”

Saul’s laugh was an ugly thing. “I did tell you not to get too close to me, sweetheart.”

“There,” said Halder. “You see? We can only ever be prey to a thing like him.”

I licked dry lips. “Have you found a reliable way to recognize them yet?”

“I have had some promising results with blood tests, though of course, none of them would be foolish enough to allow themselves to be tested willingly.” He gestured with the gun, which was now pointing more toward Saul than to me. “I am somewhat hampered by having only one specimen.

Still, I am confident that we can find a way.”

I lowered my hands, waiting to see if Halder would protest. He didn’t.

“If Phelps had just explained things to me, instead of shouting about devils…”

Halder sighed. “Phelps was a useful tool that outlived his usefulness, I am afraid. He never understood the importance of what we were doing.”

I nodded. “It is important, isn’t it?”

“You fickle little bitch,” growled Saul, and made an abortive lunge in my direction.

I dodged out of the way easily, ducking toward Halder, and heard the gun go off. A bullet whined past me and something stung my shoulder. Oh God, have I been shot? I staggered forward with a cry, tripped, and sprawled full-length on the ground.

For one crucial second, Halder took his eyes off Saul to look at me.

Saul moved in a blur. He grabbed the hand with the gun, yanked it upward. Halder pulled the trigger, but the shot went into the air. Saul dropped his head and Halder began to swing the lantern toward the other man’s face, then slowed. The lantern’s handle fell from his fingers and oil splashed over the dry pine straw, lighting immediately. More hit my skirts, which were fortunately too wet to go up. I yelped and rolled, scrambling to my feet with speed, if not grace, and began slapping at my skirts.

When I finally looked over, neither Saul nor Halder were moving, and I realized belatedly that Saul’s teeth were sunk to the gums into Halder’s wrist.

“Oh,” said Halder, his voice remarkably calm. “It would appear that your saliva possesses anesthetic qualities.”

Saul opened his mouth. I caught a flash of sharp teeth vanishing. “Yes,” he said, clamping a hand on the back of the doctor’s neck. “Useful for a parasite, don’t you think? Miss Wilson, get his gun, please.”

“Let me put this fire out first,” I said, stomping out the last flames on the pine straw.

“Time is something of a factor, Miss Wilson.”

“So is not burning alive,” I snapped, but hurried to take the gun from Halder’s fingers. He tried to hold on to it, but his fingers were rapidly going limp. A moment later he crashed down to his knees. Saul moved his grip to the fringe of hair at the back of the doctor’s head and held him up.

“Miss Wilson,” Halder said, still very calm, “you can still help me. You have the gun.”

I took a deep breath. “Why the botflies, Doctor? Why did you do that?”

“For science.” His words were beginning to slur a little.

“And did you tell other scientists what you were doing? Invite them to read your notes and see your experimental setup?”

“Of course not.”

I shook my head. “Then it wasn’t science, Dr. Halder. It was just you torturing some poor bastard in a hole in the ground.” I stepped back, lowered the gun, and nodded to Saul.

“Hmm,” said Saul thoughtfully. “Now what shall I do with you? I have so many ideas…”

Halder said nothing. I don’t know if Saul’s saliva had paralyzed him completely, or if he simply didn’t have anything to say.

“I could put you down in that hole, Halder. Down with those wolf worms you fed on my flesh. I could even find some screwworms, I expect. You made cuts on my thighs so that the screwworms would burrow in exactly where you wanted. Do you remember?” He shook Halder, just a little.

“Answer me. You’re not that numb.”

“I remember,” said Halder. His pupils were huge behind the lenses of his spectacles, as if he’d been eating opium. Phelps had said that his pig let the blood thief bite off its face, and now I understood why. Like the cockroach paralyzed by the wasp, Halder had no more will of his own.

“Even if I can’t find some screwworms, the flies will have you soon enough,” Saul said. “These move fast. One was eating through Phelps’s skull, did you know that?”

“Really?” Halder took a deep breath and seemed to rally a little. “Did it take control of his motor functions, then? I theorized…” His mouth slackened, and his theory was lost. His very last theory.

Saul ignored him. “Well, Miss Wilson? What should I do?”

My mouth was dry. The long shadows had fallen over Saul’s cheekbones and down onto Halder’s slack face. Neither of them looked human, or holy.

If I were a good person, perhaps I would have argued for Halder’s life. I probably wasn’t a good person, so I decided to be an honest one. “Saul,” I said, “if you want to kill him, do it. I’m too tired to sit in moral judgment right now. I won’t stop you. I don’t think I can stop you. I just want this to be over.”

Saul huffed something that might, under better circumstances, have been a laugh. “For me—for what Louisa went through—I should probably make you die slow. But we’re all very tired.”

He moved again, very fast, and Halder fell over on his side with a red ruin where his throat had been. I looked away as soon as I realized what I

was seeing. My shoulder still hurt. I looked down and saw a splinter of wood sticking out of it. The bullet must have knocked a sliver loose from the wall and hit me. I pulled it out and it hurt and it was very important to focus on the pain, because the alternative was to focus on the sound bubbling out of Halder’s lungs.

And then Halder’s gurgling breath stopped, and there was only silence, broken, very faintly, by a whippoorwill.

“It’s over,” I said, in a high voice. “It’s finally over.”

Saul said nothing. He said it for long enough that I turned and met those pale, pale eyes. The whippoorwill called again.

It occurred to me, like a splash of cold water, that I was the only person left who knew what Saul was, or even that he was still alive. The only one who knew that he’d killed both Phelps and Halder. The last loose end.

It would be incredibly easy for him to tidy me away. No one would think it odd that I had been killed alongside the other two, and no one would suspect a man who had been dead for a year.

He took a step forward, and I took a shuffling step back.

“Miss Wilson,” he said, and I wondered what he read in my face, and whether it would make him more or less likely to leave me alive.

I was sure that Saul was grateful for my part in his rescue, but was he grateful enough?

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m all right. I’m fine. So are you. We can just go home.”

The whippoorwill called for a third time.

His eyes narrowed.

And then I heard the familiar sound of a shotgun being cocked and Mrs.

Kent said, “Turn around slowly—” and we turned and Saul said, “Rose?” and Mrs. Kent said, “Saul!?” and I thought, Surely he won’t kill me in front of her? but then Saul was rushing toward me and I closed my eyes so that I

wouldn’t see the blow coming.

At least I died in the woods.

A long, long moment crept by, and Mrs. Kent said, “Dear god, what’s happened to you?” and it occurred to me that I wasn’t dead. I opened my eyes and saw that the world was at an unexpected angle, and then I realized that my knees had given out, but that Saul Gregor was holding me upright.

Jackson was carrying the lantern. He reached out and took the gun away from me before I could drop it. Of course he has the lantern and Rose would be the one with the shotgun. It only makes sense.

“Halder’s dead,” Saul said. “Phelps too.”

I looked up into Mrs. Kent’s face.

“Well,” said my friend Rose, swinging the shotgun away, “about damn time.”

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