Wolf Worm — Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

There were four of us around the kitchen table that night—or more accurately, three of us at the table and Rose cooking fiendishly as if she could unmake what had happened to us by sheer force of biscuits.

Saul ate them too. Does he digest them normally, or does he have to cast them up again, like owl pellets? I should ask. Later.

After two changes of bathwater, Saul looked infinitely better. His back was probably still a horror show, but if you couldn’t see that, he just looked like a very tired human. Rose brought him one of Halder’s dressing gowns, which barely reached his knees, but was probably an improvement over my apron. I took my own bath, heated with water from the big boiler in the scullery, and scrubbed with soap so harsh that it stung. My skin did not quite stop crawling afterward, but I was able to tell myself that it was only my nerves.

“Knew we shouldn’t trust Phelps,” Jackson said, for the third or fourth time. “He talked a good game, pretending to search for you, but I knew something was off … Love, sit down, for god’s sake, you’ve made enough food for an army.”

Rose muttered something uncomplimentary, but finally pulled the pan off the stoves. “All right, all right…” She dropped into her chair and folded her arms. “How long were you down there?”

“About three months, I think,” Saul said. I lifted my head at that. His expression didn’t change by so much as a fraction, but he met my eyes for a long, long moment. I took a slug of coffee and looked away.

“Three months?” Rose clamped a hand over her mouth. Jackson swore, hard and heartfelt, and put a hand on Saul’s shoulder.

“After I got shot, I was out of commission for … well, quite a long time,” Saul said. “I was half out of my mind with fever and I just knew I had to get away. Wound up in a jail out in Tennessee, after I knocked somebody down that I shouldn’t. They dug the bullet out of me and I pulled through, but it was a pretty miserable time. When I finally got out, I came back here, thinking Louisa must still be here, but that bastard Phelps caught sight of me, and…” He spread his hands. “You can guess the rest.”

Rose reached out and took Saul’s hand, while Jackson tightened his grip, their heads bowed as if in prayer. “I’m sorry,” Jackson said finally. “Shit, Saul. I’m so sorry.”

“Miss Wilson here saved my life,” Saul said. “If she hadn’t found me down there, I don’t know how much longer I would have lasted.”

I looked away, recognizing the meaning of those words. Much, much longer. Years, perhaps.

“The hero of the hour,” said Jackson, beaming, and Rose reached out her other hand and took mine.

We sat like that for a little while, and of course it was Rose who was the practical one. She stirred and said, “What are we going to tell the sheriff?”

“Can we just hide the bodies?” asked Saul.

“Not smart,” said Jackson. “Halder may be a recluse but they’ll notice Phelps isn’t at church. And Phelps has animals on his farm that somebody’s gotta tend to, and they’ll wonder why I knew to go feed ’em.”

“Then we’d best get all our stories straight,” said Rose, and got up to put on another pot of coffee.

Jackson went for the sheriff late that night, and I went up to bed to snatch what sleep I could before I had to lie to the authorities. Saul went with me, stopping just inside the studio door.

“Are you going to tell them the truth?” he asked.

“The truth?” I looked at him blearily. “We just got done rehearsing that

story three times over.”

“Not the sheriff. The Kents.”

I was so tired that it actually took me a moment to realize what truth he meant. “Oh, that you didn’t spend the last year in a Tennessee jail?”

One corner of his mouth lifted, showing perfectly ordinary blunt teeth. “I did spend some time in one once, you know. Just not that recently.”

I snorted. “No one would believe me. I don’t even know that I believe it, and I saw all of it happen.”

He nodded. At the doorway, he added, “Thank you. You saved my life once, and this … this saves it again.”

“You saved mine, so I suppose we’re even.” I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I knew that I needed to. “Was it true, what Halder said? About how your people reproduce?”

The shadows through the windows were blue-black, the color of bruises, the color of the shadows under Saul’s eyes. “It’s true enough.” He gripped the doorframe and I heard the wood creak slightly. “But even a parasite may come to understand its own nature, and choose to live another way.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. We nodded to each other,

and he turned to go.

“Hey, Saul?”

He stuck his head back through the doorway. “Yes?”

I dredged up a smile. “I promise not to treat you like a bizarre specimen or an experiment, but if you don’t eventually show me how your teeth work, I’m going to go out of my head wondering.”

He laughed, for once without that awful clicking sound. “Remind me, and I’ll show you.”

He let himself out of the studio, and I fell down on the bed and into a dark and dreamless sleep.

The story we cooked up about Halder and Phelps was a simple one in the end. Jackson went for the sheriff, saying that there was some kind of big animal in the woods and it had killed Halder but he’d shot at it and run it off. A couple of deputies came out and we let them discover Phelps and the dead animals. I said that something had chased me and I’d spent the night up a tree, hoping not to be eaten. No, I hadn’t gotten a good look at it, just

that it was big. I’d finally come down and was trying to find the house when I heard the gunshots and shouted for help, and Jackson found me.

The sheriff asked a bunch of questions about the shed and I told them that Phelps had been awfully eager to keep people away from it. With the record of the telegram at the station calling Halder urgently to come deal with a problem in the shed, the sheriff concluded, logically enough, that Halder had been keeping some kind of dangerous animal and that it had gotten out and savaged him. They scoured the woods for a week and told people to be on their guard, but when nobody else showed up with their throat torn out, people started to relax. (I’m pretty sure Saul and Jackson went down into the shed first and cleaned up a few things that might have led to awkward questions, but I didn’t ask. I did ask what they did about the botflies down there, and Jackson showed me a bag of Paris Green insecticide. There wasn’t much we could do about the ones that had gotten out, but at least the sheriff didn’t get infected when he went down to check it.) A couple reporters did turn up to ask questions, but it was so difficult to find the house at all that most of them just lay in wait for Jackson when he went into town. The one who showed up on the property got a very chilly send-off. The Kents’ hound had a remarkably bloodcurdling bay that did not betray his desperate desire to be loved by everyone and everything.

None of us mentioned Saul at all, and no one asked. Sally went home to her family so it was just the four of us, and the sheriff never even searched the house.

It was a strange time. None of us knew what was going to happen next.

Halder died without a will, so everything would have gone to his next of kin, namely Louisa, wherever she had vanished to. The lawyer, with much hemming and hawing, allowed us to draw our last month’s wages from the bank, but made it clear that no more would be forthcoming.

I should probably have been looking for another job, but it felt as if I would be abandoning Jackson and Rose to their fate. And for some things, at least, it was useful to be a white woman with a large vocabulary. The lawyer had not unbent until I spoke to him sternly about the terms of our employment and the estate’s duty to pay outstanding debts. It shouldn’t have mattered that I knew the right words to say, but it did, and it shouldn’t

have mattered that I was white, but the lawyer was that sort of man, so that did too.

Saul also needed my help. His back was healing at a frightening rate, but the way that the skin had torn meant that there were long stringy bits hanging down that had to be dealt with. I was a poor choice compared to Rose or Ma Kersey, but I was also the one who wouldn’t be surprised by how fast he healed. So I gritted my teeth and cut the ragged ends free, feeling like a torturer’s apprentice. In time, that too healed.

There was also the matter of the botflies. New warbles appeared on Saul’s skin for almost a week after he was freed, and I removed the ones he couldn’t reach himself. “Farmers do this for cattle,” he told me, on the third or fourth day. “I never quite appreciated how the cattle must feel about it.”

“I hope they feel grateful,” I grumbled.

“Rest assured, Miss Wilson, I am far more grateful than any cow has ever been.” He swept me a bow that might have been more charming if he weren’t shirtless and if I weren’t holding a jar with half-grown larvae

wriggling at the bottom.

“Hmmph!” I said, handing him the jar.

Truth was, we joked about it because otherwise neither of us would ever stop screaming. There was a stretch where the new skin on his back was so fragile that it was transparent, and I could actually see the wolf worms moving under it. I learned how to skewer each one and pull it out with as little damage to Saul as possible, and then I’d joke and he’d joke and then I would go sit somewhere with my head between my knees until I was sure I wouldn’t be sick.

But I got off lightly, all told. I spent five days checking my skin obsessively for new lumps. My own collarbone sent me into a panic at least twice. I boiled endless amounts of water and took baths so hot that I shrieked when I lowered myself in, but I had to be sure.

“Oh honey,” said Rose, when she found me with the scissors, cutting my hair down to a ragged fringe so that I could better feel my scalp.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling wretched and pathetic and more than a little mad.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t handle all this stuff in the way.”

Rose sighed and set down the bundle of towels she had been carrying.

“Come here. Let’s see what I can do.”

I hung my head while she worked, hearing the snick-snick-snick of the blades. More hair fell away. “Shame you’re a white girl,” she said absently.

“When I did this, my mama managed to braid it so you couldn’t hardly tell.”

I raised my eyebrows. The back of my neck felt prickly and exposed.

“You did this once?”

“Sure … back when I was eight.”

I hung my head. Rose snorted. “And once again when I was about twenty. Found my man cheating on me and just knew I needed to cut my hair off. Mama said it was easier to fix when I was eight though.”

“I can’t imagine you cutting your hair off over a man,” I admitted.

“Yeah, well. He did me a favor in the end. Met Jackson not too long after that.” She finished and set the scissors down. “There. Can’t say it’s fashionable, but it looks more like you’ve been sick than like somebody took a knife to it.”

“You keep saving me,” I said, running my hands through the shorn ends.

“I’m sorry you keep needing to. I swear, I’m not normally so…” I trailed off, not sure what word I wanted. Helpless. Useless. Lost.

Rose snorted again. “You got that lawyer to hand over the money. That’s

worth a lot more than a haircut, hon.”

“Yes, but…”

“The rest was Halder, not you. Don’t be too eager to take up the blame.”

She handed me a dustpan and we swept up the cuttings together. She left me running my fingers over my skull, waiting for the wolf worms to rise.

My dreams, after that first night, were endless and vivid and terrible. The doctor from Siler City came out and diagnosed me with disordered nerves, and told Jackson (for lack of anyone else, I suppose) that it wasn’t to be wondered at, given what had happened to Halder. He gave me laudanum. I took it for a week, found myself craving it too much, and dumped the rest of it out. I could not afford a laudanum habit. The dreams returned. I endured them, because there was no other choice.

Once or twice, I even thought about asking Saul to bite me, the way that he had Halder. Then I thought about getting addicted to someone’s saliva and how much more inconvenient that would be than laudanum, and I didn’t.

After a week, it seemed like I had gotten away uninfected. I cried a little in my room, then washed my face and went to help Rose in the kitchen.

And so we waited, all four of us, like an indrawn breath. Waited for healing or for something to happen. I finally wrote a letter to Headmistress Silverton, asking if my old position was still open. It cost me a great deal of pride to write it, and when I received an answer in the post, the envelope sat, unopened, on the studio table.

We might have waited until the house fell down, or at least until the contents of the larder ran out, but then, nearly three weeks after Halder died, Louisa arrived.

I recognized her immediately when I walked into the studio and saw an unfamiliar woman standing there. She fit into the place as I never had. You only had to take one look at her face to recognize that she had come home.

She wasn’t beautiful. That surprised me. It shouldn’t have, I suppose.

Halder had married her for her money and her skill with watercolors. It was just that Saul loved her, and so some part of me assumed that she must have been beautiful as well. But Louisa had broad hips and a broad face, her skin dusted with old measles scars, and her teeth were crooked when she smiled.

Then the force of that smile hit me, and I had an inkling what Saul must have seen when he said that she made you feel alive just by being in the same room.

“Miss Wilson?” she asked, taking a step forward. “It is Miss Wilson, isn’t it?”

“You’re Louisa,” I said, my mind blank with astonishment. “You came back.”

“Of course I did.” She took both my hands in hers. “Saul and Rose have told me so much about you. I can’t ever thank you enough for what you’ve done.” (She meant it too. That was part of what was so astonishing. It wasn’t just words. You couldn’t doubt that she meant every word that she said.) “It was nothing. I mean—no, I don’t mean it was nothing, but—” I floundered a bit and tried again. “Anyone in my position would have done

the same.”

“I doubt that highly.” She squeezed both my hands and released me and I took a step back.

It was easier to look around the room than at the naked gratitude on Louisa’s face. “I … err.” I swallowed. “This is your room. I should move my things out.”

Louisa started to protest, but I waved my hands, trying not to show the pang that I felt. Things are changing again. You had a little time, but now that’s over. On to the next thing, whatever that is. “I should have gone before now. I just … err … hadn’t.” I went to the table and began hastily picking up my brushes. Some of which were her brushes. Oh damn … “Do you have somewhere to go?”

She asked it softly and kindly and certainly did not mean for it to feel like a knife of uncertainty sliding between my ribs. I picked up the unopened envelope from Headmistress Silverton. “No need to worry,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

Louisa was silent for a moment, then said, carefully, “Do you mean that you’ll actually be fine, or do you mean that you don’t want to impose?”

I met her eyes, startled. They were a muddy hazel color, nothing to incite a poet’s fancy, but in them, I saw a terrible understanding.

Of course. She fled with nothing and had to make her own way for the last few years. She’s been there too.

“I…” I licked dry lips. “I don’t actually have anything lined up,” I admitted. “If I could stay for a few days, just long enough to send some letters, and see…”

“Miss Wilson, you can have a few years, if you want it. And the estate certainly owes you for the work you’ve done. I can never repay you for saving Saul’s life.”

I shook my head. “You don’t need to repay me for that.”

“He says that you know about him.”

“I do, but…” I spread my hands helplessly. “You don’t have to buy my silence about that. I won’t tell anyone.” A laugh crackled out of me. “Hell, no one would believe me anyway.”

She snorted. “I know. I felt the same way when I found out. It’s all completely mad, isn’t it?” She rubbed her forehead.

“Completely. Utterly.” I felt a sudden rush of fellow-feeling for the only other human who knew about Saul’s people.

“Did he show you the teeth?”

“Yes!” I shoved my hands into the remains of my hair. “I didn’t know whether to scream or have him do it again in better light!” (Saul’s teeth were indeed in his throat, after a fashion. They lay far back until he flexed some muscle or other, then they swung forward and fitted behind the front set. It was shocking to see and I still wasn’t sure how he didn’t slice his tongue to ribbons.) “It’s called a ‘pharyngeal jaw,’ I think,” said Louisa, reminding me that she too had spent a long time as a naturalist. “At least, that’s what they call it in moray eels. I don’t think most mammals have them.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You told him that and he said, ‘Oh, so now I’m

an eel?’”

“Oh, so you have met him!”

Our eyes met and we both began to laugh. I won’t swear that it wasn’t a trifle hysterical on my part, but maybe it was for her too.

“I’ll stay,” I said, when I had wiped the tears from my eyes. “At least for a little while.”

“Oh, good.” Louisa hooked her arm through mine. “Because as it happens, there’s a project I need help with, and I think you’re the only other person who will understand.”

It was Ma Kersey who sent for Louisa, I eventually learned. She hitched a ride into town and sent a telegram to her family back in Robeson County, where she had sent Louisa a year prior. The telegram then passed through a few dozen sets of hands, and was finally delivered to Louisa, nearly three hundred miles away. Such was the power of Ma Kersey’s family connections.

Seeing Louisa and Saul together eased a fear I hadn’t known I had.

There was nothing predatory in Saul’s eyes when he looked at her. He looked more like a worshipper gazing on the face of his god. Even his

acidic tongue softened a little, though Louisa was more likely to go off into fits of laughter than to take offense to anything he said.

The one thing he asked of me was not to tell Louisa how long he had been trapped in the shed. “It would only hurt her,” he said, “and what good would it do any of us now?”

I agreed, and not because I was afraid. Saul had a strange, perhaps even twisted moral code, but it seemed that I was firmly on the safe side of it. (Besides if he killed me and dumped my body in a hole, it would have upset Louisa, and I’m pretty sure that Saul would have gnawed his own arm off rather than upset Louisa.) I moved back into the room I’d stayed in the first night. I missed the light of the studio, but as it happened, I had plenty of other work to occupy me, and most of it involved Halder’s papers.

“I can’t read them,” said Louisa bluntly. “I hated him. I still hate him. I’ll end up burning it all in a fit of rage.”

“I don’t think anyone will care if you do.”

She sighed, running her hands through her hair. “No. That’s the thing. I can’t decide what to do about his book.”

We stood in Halder’s office—or more accurately, I sat behind the desk while Louisa paced back and forth like a caged beast. Smiley tried to twine around her ankles a few times, realized that she was not going to oblige by tripping over him, and had settled down on my lap to sulk.

“He put in years of research on his book,” Louisa said. “I don’t want him to get credit for it. I don’t want anyone to read his name and think he was a great scientist.” She paused in front of the table where I had stacked all the dozens of illustrations liberated from the cabinet. “But I worked on it for years, too, dammit.”

“Ahhh.” Suddenly everything came clear. Of course she had. All those magnificent beetle shells and delicate fly wings, all those tiny, elegant antennae … those represented more than a decade of Louisa’s life.

“Saul thinks I should leave it all in the past,” she said. “But I can’t let all those paintings go. For years, they were practically my reason for living.”

She flashed me a quick smile. “I don’t know if you feel the same way about yours.”

“I’d hate to see them wasted,” I admitted. “I already got paid for them, so maybe it shouldn’t matter to me what happens to them now, but it does.”

“Exactly.” Louisa tapped the tabletop. “What I’d like to do is find some other entomologist who can take his notes and the completed plates and produce something useful from them. And that doctor can have his name front and center, and we can have our names on the frontispiece and my late husband can be a footnote somewhere in the back.”

I thought of Halder’s near-apoplectic rage at the thought of other people stealing his work, and felt a smile begin to spread over my face. It wasn’t a nice smile, but it was deeply genuine.

“You understand,” said Louisa, with an echo of that same malicious

smile.

“Oh, I do.”

“However…” Louisa spread her hands. “I don’t know anyone. But if you’re willing to go through his correspondence, maybe you can find someone. Someone who isn’t as detestable a human being as my late husband was.”

I nodded. “Between that and the naturalists my father knew, I suspect I can come up with something.”

“That would be worth a great deal to me, Miss Wilson.”

“Please,” I said, picking up the first letter. “Call me Sonia.”

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