Wolf Worm — Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

“The studio suite?” Mrs. Kent frowned at me, not a negative frown but a puzzled one. “Huh.”

“Is there something wrong?” I asked timidly. “He said I should use the paints there.”

“No. Just surprised, that’s all.” She squared her shoulders. “I haven’t done more than dust it for the last year. I’ll have Sally bring fresh sheets.”

“I’m sorry to keep making more work for you,” I murmured.

“No, it’s fine. I…” She stopped, clearly thinking better of what she was about to say. “It’s a very fine room.”

She led me up to the second story, on the far side of the house from Halder’s study, and pushed open a door. I stepped inside and felt my eyes go wide.

Glass doors on the far side of the room opened onto a narrow widow’s walk, flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows that left the room filled with light. The walls were painted white and had no wallpaper, and the polished wooden boards gleamed. Yellow ochre and burnt umber for the wood, gamboge for the squares of light across them … It was a beautiful, airy space, and it was clear that I wasn’t the first person to think so, because the room was strewn with books and brushes, pencils and palettes, even a silk dressing gown tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. It looked as if the owner had simply stepped out a moment earlier.

A doorway on my left led to a bedroom. The bed had been stripped, but that was the only sign that it was unoccupied. One door of a wooden wardrobe stood ajar. It still had clothes in it.

“Are you sure…” I began, and stopped. Are you sure no one is using this? I wanted to ask, but that was a ridiculous question. Obviously Mrs.

Kent would know.

“I’ll just get these out of here,” the housekeeper said, following my gaze to the wardrobe. “They should be packed in a chest anyway.”

“But who was using it before—”

“If you want to fetch your suitcase,” Mrs. Kent interrupted, “I’ll send Sally up with the sheets.”

“Oh! Yes, of course.” By the time I had returned with my suitcase, the wardrobe was empty and Mrs. Kent had gone. I unpacked my clothes again, then stood in the center of the studio, looking around helplessly. Even though Halder had said that I was to use this suite, I felt as if I was intruding.

I drifted to the worktable near one of the windows. Tin tubes of oil paint were heaped to one side, and I read the names as if greeting old friends.

Zinc White. Rose Madder. Aureolin. Cobalt Violet. Chromium Green Oxide.

And there, a sturdy wooden box with the lid flipped up, and blocks of familiar pigment slotted into dozens of little cubbyholes. A porcelain palette lay next to it, the white surface stained with old washes.

These must have belonged to the artist who had painted such exquisite beetles. I wondered who they were, and why they had left before finishing Halder’s illustrations. Mrs. Kent had said that she hadn’t done more than dust for the last year. Had it simply been left like this, untouched? And why had Halder waited so long to seek out a replacement?

The door opened behind me. I turned, finally catching a glimpse of the elusive Sally. She was a small white girl with mousy brown hair, who was probably older than twelve and younger than twenty. (Despite teaching girls for a number of years, I still can’t tell ages apart after a point. They all just

look incredibly young to me.) “Are you Sally?” I ventured.

Sally let out a shriek and flung the sheets she was carrying into the air.

“Oh! You startled me, miss!”

“I see that,” I said, a bit more dryly than I intended. By the way she’d thrown the sheets, you’d think I had announced my intent to kill and eat her on the spot.

“’M not used to other people in the house, miss,” Sally explained.

“The doctor doesn’t have many visitors?” I asked, helping her to gather up the linens.

“Oh no, miss. Not often.” She screwed up her face in thought. “Last one was another doctor, I think? Only not a doctor at the hospital, but like the doctor here. All bugs and such. Why, he had a box of grasshoppers in his

luggage! Live ones!”

“No family, then?”

“Oh no, miss. Doesn’t even put up a Christmas tree for the season, ’cause no one visits. But I go to the Kents for Christmas, so that’s all right.”

I filed this away while helping her make the bed. No family, and apparently few friends. Given his manner, I couldn’t say that last surprised me much. Though if he was like most naturalists I know, he probably kept up dozens of correspondences with other people in the field.

Sally showed me where the catches were on the doors to the balcony.

The windows were already open, letting a breeze swirl through the room.

“Will there be anything else, miss?” she asked. Judging by her hopeful air, I was providing rather more entertainment than her usual cleaning. I was sorry to disappoint her, but I already knew that I couldn’t compete with live grasshoppers in the luggage.

“I’m afraid not. I don’t have much to unpack. Is there anything I should know?”

She sat down on the bed and gave this serious thought. “Mrs. Graham comes by for the laundry on Tuesday, so you’ll want to leave yours in the basket on Monday night. And there’s bugs in the water sometimes. They startle you if you aren’t expecting it! But if you need water for drinking, you know, that’s definitely got no bugs, there’s a pump by the kitchen.”

“That is good to know,” I said gravely, wondering if everyone here was simply used to washing their faces with bug water and if I’d be used to it in a few weeks myself. But at least it did answer the question of insects in the coffee. I was starting to wish I’d had a second cup. “Do you stay here at the house, or do you go home at night?”

“Oh, I stay here, miss.” She nodded so vigorously that strands of hair escaped her braid. “My family lives ’bout two miles down the road, and it ain’t safe to walk through the woods at night.”

“Because of—err—bears?” I asked, racking my brain for something suitably dangerous. Surely there weren’t enough humans in this part of the county to be significant, and I hadn’t gotten the impression that Sally was religious enough to share Asa Phelps’s fear of meeting the Devil.

She gave me a pitying look for my ignorance. “On account of the blood

thiefs, miss.”

“Blood … thieves?”

“Blood thiefs,” she agreed. “They steal your blood and leave you all drained out and dead and limp.” She demonstrated, letting her head flop to

one side and her arms dangle.

“And what do they look like?”

She shook her head solemnly. “Nobody knows. My cousin says he seen one and it was like a great big bat, but he’s a liar. If he’d seen one, it’d’ve stole his blood too.”

I rubbed my temples. First Phelps and the Devil, now this. Apparently the woods of central North Carolina were a hotbed of the supernatural. “Are you teasing me, Sally?”

“What? No, miss!” She looked shocked by the idea. “Not about the blood thiefs. My mama wouldn’t let me take the job unless I stayed here because of them. You can go ask her.”

“No, no, I believe you.” I believed that she believed it, for what that was worth. “We … err … don’t have those in Wilmington.”

“No, but you got sharks,” Sally offered generously, “so I s’pose it evens out.”

She took her leave and I unpacked my suitcase, still shaking my head. It really didn’t take long. I stacked my sketchbooks by the studio table and placed the Botanica on the shelf, then found myself wandering aimlessly from window to window, looking out onto a short swath of grass and a deep sea of trees.

The room still did not feel unoccupied. It felt as if the owner had gone away shortly before, taking some of their personal effects, but planned to return. Everywhere I turned, I saw my predecessor’s hand. The gorgeous golden light from the windows streamed over objects arranged on the broad windowsills—interesting rocks, an empty snail shell, a long blue feather that might have come from a jay. It was so clearly an artist’s space.

Now, however temporarily, it was mine.

I checked the books scattered about the room, hoping desperately for an anatomical guide to insects. Instead I found novels. The bedroom yielded nearly a complete collection of Brontë, and The Last of the Mohicans lay

open facedown on the desk. I picked the book up and attempted to close it, but it had lain open so long that the spine had warped.

You’re stalling. Get to work.

“Well,” I said, sitting down at the desk and placing the beautiful carrion beetle illustrations against the carved backstop. “Let’s see if I can figure out how you did this…”

I stopped painting that evening when the light was no longer good enough to trust my eyes. I massaged the backs of my eyelids, opened my eyes, and looked from the illustrated beetle to my own attempts. I certainly hadn’t managed to duplicate my predecessor’s skill, but after a half dozen experiments, I thought that I had worked out how they had managed the gorgeous tinting of the burying beetle’s shell. Resisting the urge to overwork the paint was key. That’s always the problem with watercolor, of course. You have to know when to stop. The temptation to add just one more wash is so strong sometimes— If I just add a little bit more, I can fix all the things that aren’t quite right yet.

What actually winds up happening is usually that everything gets darker and muddier. Watercolor pigment is water-soluble—obviously—so if you add even a little water to an area that’s already dry, it rewets all the paint you’ve already laid down. Add even a fraction too much and everything runs together into soup. Gouache is the same, except that it’s opaque where watercolor is transparent. Combining the two can work beautifully, or you can accidentally overwork an area that was almost perfect and turn it into sludge.

I cleaned my brushes and sighed. I always told my students to use a quarter of the water they thought they needed and to practice patience above all else. I then failed to heed this advice myself. Do as I say, not as I am actually doing right now … I picked several dead mosquitos out of the basin, washed my hands and face, and went down to the kitchen to see about dinner.

Delicious smells wafted through the corridor as I approached the kitchen.

When I stepped inside, I found Mrs. Kent bustling, which is rather like puttering but conducted at twice the speed and with far greater efficiency.

Sally was sitting at the table, alongside a short, wiry white man with thinning hair.

“Hello,” I said. “Am I late for dinner? I’m sorry, I lost track of time.”

“You’re just on time,” said Mrs. Kent, lifting the lid from a pot and stirring the contents. “We eat a bit late in summer, since the doctor doesn’t take his tray until after dark.”

The man at the table rose and extended a hand. His hair was dark blond, grizzled with white at the temples. More yellow ochre and some raw umber.

And white gouache, I think, I’m not going to mask out individual white hairs, that way lies madness … “I’m Jackson Kent,” he said, interrupting my musings on color. “Rose’s husband. You must be Miss Wilson.”

Ah. Suddenly much was made clear about why Mrs. Kent might prefer to work for a man who loathed everyone equally, regardless of the color of their skin. I wondered where the Kents had been married, and why they had chosen to live in a state where their union was considered illegal. But that is not my business, and if Mrs. Kent wishes to enlighten me, I’m sure she will.

I grasped his hand and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kent.”

I hadn’t quite noticed the tension in the room until it suddenly eased. Ah.

That was a hurdle that we all had to get over together, I see. I took a seat at the table. “Do you work for Dr. Halder as well?”

“Oh, aye. Odd jobs and handiwork, splitting firewood, all that’s needful.” He sat back down. “And you’re a painter, I hear?” He had a faint accent that might have been Scottish or simply from the mountains where so many Scots had settled.

“Scientific illustrations, yes. The doctor has retained my services to illustrate his book on insects.” That sounded awfully stiff, so I added, “All thousand or so of them. I suspect I’ll still be painting bugs sometime into the next century.”

Mr. Kent laughed. “He’s certainly got a lot of them on pins in the library.

I suppose you’ve seen them already?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. “I just got in yesterday. I imagine I’ll be spending a lot of time there.”

“Oh, aye. Well, when you do get up there, remember who had to haul every single case up to that room.” He grinned. “And I’ve the backaches to prove it.”

“Grab your plates,” Mrs. Kent ordered. We dutifully filed past the stove, scooping up rice and ladling beans over the top. The smell of ham and onions mingled with beans made my mouth water. This was a far cry from the meals at the school, where I suspect that the headmistress feared excessive flavor might lead to insurrection.

I dug into my food like a starving woman. The beans had more spice than I was used to, but I didn’t care. Jackson eyed the sweat popping out on my forehead and passed me the cornbread. “You might want this,” he said, sounding amused but sympathetic. “Rose’s food bites back.”

Mrs. Kent sniffed. “It’s an insult to the pig to turn it into something bland. If I was a pig, I’d want to know I died delicious.”

I swallowed my mouthful of cornbread. “This is the best thing I’ve eaten in years.”

She sniffed again, but I could tell she was pleased. “Just beans and rice,

nothing special.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Not the sort of food you’re used to?” asked Jackson. I admired the tact of the question, which expressed curiosity without demanding details I might not want to give.

“Not at all. My last post was teaching art at a girls’ school in Wilmington.” I briefly considered how much to tell, but really, what was I hiding? I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to be an international woman of mystery. Actually, I’m not sure what it takes. Confidence? Sex appeal?

Extra stockings?

“Oh, out on the coast.” Jackson nodded to me. “Been out there a time or two. Pretty country.”

Sally piped up for the first time. “Aren’t there awful hurricanes out there?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “We got two or three bad storms a year. I was only there for a few years though. The old-timers told stories about hurricanes that leveled buildings and flooded the streets, but I never saw one myself.”

“I’d be mortal scared,” said Sally, sounding quite satisfied by the prospect.

“I was scared stiff the first time a hurricane rolled in,” I admitted. “It gets so dark and so loud and you can’t tell if it’s rain or spray hitting the building.” The older students, most of whom had grown up on the coast, had found my terror rather quaint. A sweet girl named Edith spent much of the first storm sitting with me and patting my hand whenever a particularly loud gust of wind came through. It was slightly embarrassing to be comforted by a girl half my age, but I was still grateful for the kindness. (She later went on to become a nurse, and the last I heard was working in a sanitarium for victims of consumption. I imagine she patted a great many hands over the years.) “We only get the leftovers of your hurricanes,” Jackson said. “A lot of rain and a few trees come down, but that’s usually it.”

“I can’t say I’ll miss them.” I chased the last of the beans around with my cornbread. “I haven’t been to this part of the state before. What do you have, if not hurricanes?”

“Summer,” said Mrs. Kent darkly. “Gets so hot and muggy, you feel like you’re chewing the air afore you swallow it. And then it’s sickly season and we’ll all be taking Jesuit’s bark and hope the ague passes us by.”

I grimaced. Malaria season was the worst of the school year, as our students would be struck down with various shades of fever and ague.

Quinine—what Mrs. Kent called Jesuit’s bark—helped a great deal, though getting the youngest students to take the nasty-tasting stuff was a trial. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to that part.”

“No one does,” Jackson said.

“Had bilious fever when I was nine,” said Sally proudly. “Said I was like to die, but I didn’t.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said, and she giggled. “What else do you have here?”

All three of them chimed in, relaying tales of snowstorms (rare) and tornadoes (slightly less rare). Plus cottonmouths, copperheads, and, of course, bears.

“Not that any of them are much trouble,” Jackson assured me. “Bear’ll run the other way nine times out of ten, and copperheads just freeze up and hope you don’t touch ’em. People swear cottonmouths chase you, but if you get out of their way, they’ll go right past you often as not. It’s usually some

damn fool who decides to kill it with a stick and then gets real surprised when the snake isn’t keen on letting that happen.”

I snorted. “I’m familiar with the type. Snakes don’t bother me. My father had a friend who studied them.”

“Around here, it’s more bugs than snakes,” said Mrs. Kent. “You put your hand down on a wheel bug, you’ll know you’ve been somewhere.

Feels like somebody hit you with a hammer and kept on hitting. Some big centipedes too.”

“A centipede stung me once,” said Sally. “Felt like a hot wire. And it hurt for days.”

“I suppose I’ll be expected to paint all of them eventually,” I said with a sigh. I wasn’t looking forward to the centipedes. I had told Halder the truth, I wasn’t squeamish, but I object to things with so many legs that they look like they’re flowing instead of walking. Particularly when they pack a nasty bite. (The centipede had probably bit Sally, since they don’t actually have stingers, but being pedantic was no longer part of my job description.) I cast about for a slightly more palatable topic of conversation. “When I was riding in, Mr. Phelps said something about a place called the Devil’s Tramping Ground.”

“Oh, him,” said Mrs. Kent, in a tone indicating that she thought more highly of the wheel bugs.

“It’s a real place,” said Jackson. “I can even take you out there sometime if you like. Can’t say it’s very interesting though. Just a big bare patch in the middle of the woods.”

“My da said the Devil stomped around in a circle there and burned all the grass away.”

“Phelps did talk a great deal about the Devil,” I said, as neutrally as possible. Neither of the Kents struck me as intensely religious, but you never know.

Jackson scoffed. “Phelps hasn’t talked about much else since he got religion a while back. Nothing wrong with Christian duty, but he’s one of those more interested in hell than heaven, if you know the sort.”

“Oh, I do.” It was nice to have my suspicions confirmed, anyway. I don’t usually dislike people immediately, but I couldn’t say that Phelps had left a favorable impression. “He was actually claiming he’d seen the Devil in the woods here.”

The pause that followed that lasted just slightly too long. “Man’s a fanatic if you ask me,” said Mrs. Kent, getting to her feet. “Sally, if you’re done, it’s time to get scrubbing on the dishes.”

“Yes’m,” said Sally. She stacked the dishes and carried them off to the scullery.

Jackson waited until she was gone, pulled a flask from his pocket, and poured a measure of amber liquid into his empty cup. “You imbibe, Miss Wilson?”

“In very small amounts.” I pushed my cup forward and he poured in just enough to cover the bottom. I took a sip. It burned savagely and I choked back a cough. “Good lord!”

“I make it myself,” Jackson said. He eyed the contents of his cup appraisingly. “This batch is a little rough, I admit.”

“That batch isn’t fit for anything but horse liniment,” said Mrs. Kent over her shoulder.

I tried a second sip. It did not exactly grow on me, but my throat had already endured the worst, so it went down easier.

“So I shouldn’t worry about tripping over the Devil, but I should worry about tripping over your still?”

“Oh, aye, nothing in these woods any scarier than that.” He paused, his smile slowly fading. “At least, not anymore.”

I looked up, startled, but Mrs. Kent was already turning. “Don’t go filling her head with that old nonsense,” she snapped. Jackson held up both hands in surrender and she grumbled at him, then turned back to preparing the tray for Halder’s supper.

I raised an inquiring eyebrow at Jackson. He grimaced and shook his head, then leaned forward and poured me another thimbleful of moonshine.

Even after the burn had faded, even after I sought the bed in the little room off the studio, the question stayed with me of what Jackson had been about to say, and why his wife had been so quick to stop him.

Falling asleep that night was difficult. I had been too tired the night before to notice, but now I lay in bed, listening, and the unfamiliarity of it all lay

over me like a blanket.

It had been some years since I slept in a room alone. At the school, I had shared quarters with the French instructor, a lively young woman named Esther who was always moving, never alighting for long. There was always cloth rustling, feet tapping, fingers drumming. She even slept restlessly, tossing and turning and wrapping the bedclothes around herself in a hopeless tangle. It was strange not to hear that now, and instead to hear the swelling chorus of frogs and katydids, punctuated by the distant call of a barred owl.

The irony was that I knew those sounds too. Once upon a time I had known them as well as I knew my own name. Hearing them now, so long after Father’s final illness and my time in Wilmington, felt like coming back to a childhood home gone unfamiliar and strange.

Relax. It’s just an owl, not blood thieves. I snorted. Sally’s mother was probably hoping not to have an extra mouth to feed in the evenings, and had spun up a story to suit. Presumably if there was a mysterious creature draining the blood out of people locally, it would have come up over dinner.

Though I wasn’t surprised that Sally hadn’t brought them up in front of the others, since Mrs. Kent clearly wasn’t the sort to suffer nonsense, judging by the way she’d cut her husband off.

The floorboards creaked. I came instantly alert, wondering if someone had entered the room. Oh god, please let it not be Halder, please let him not be that sort of employer, I need this job— A weight landed at the foot of the bed, stalked regally to the midpoint, flopped down, and began to purr.

“Smiley, you wretch,” I said. “You scared me.”

Smiley, showing no remorse whatsoever, wriggled around until his back was pressed against my hip and went to sleep. And after a few minutes, feeling oddly reassured, so did I.

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