Wolf Worm — Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

I slept until a decadent eight in the morning and rose feeling well-rested.

For all my sense of intruding, the studio felt like a home. Not my home, but someone else’s—well-used and well-loved. I dressed and wandered through the outer room, running my fingers over the painting desk, picking up random stones from the windowsill, turning them over, then setting them down again. I wondered if the previous tenant had collected them because they had some sentimental quality, or if she had simply thought that they were pretty. (I was nearly certain that my predecessor had been a woman.

What clothing I had glimpsed in the wardrobe bore that out. Somewhere there is undoubtedly a man who prefers green suits printed with pink rosebuds, but in my acquaintance, they are few.) Eventually my stomach growled and I went down to breakfast.

“Mrs. Kent?”

“Hmm?” Her back was to me, as she scrambled what looked like vast quantities of eggs.

“The studio I’m in—who was in there before me?”

The housekeeper paused for a fraction of an instant, then resumed whisking. “Can’t rightly say,” she said. Her tone was unexpectedly cool.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…” I started to wave my hands apologetically, realized that she couldn’t see me, and let them drop into my lap. “I thought you’d been here when it was occupied.”

Mrs. Kent shrugged, then slid eggs onto a plate and put it down in front of me and turned back to her cooking. I got the distinct impression that I was intruding on her work, bolted my eggs and coffee, and slipped away.

It took me three tries to find the library, since I had forgotten to ask Mrs.

Kent for directions and I didn’t want to bother her again. I wandered the

hallway near Halder’s rooms, hoping that I wasn’t about to open the door to his bedroom. Fortunately, after a locked door and a linen closet, I pushed open the third door and stepped into a large room lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, each with dozens of shallow drawers. I recognized the style immediately and laughed at myself for thinking that a library would be full of books.

This was a library of insects. Extremely shallow drawers at the top of each cabinet gave way to slightly deeper ones lower down, though none were deeper than the width of my palm. Each drawer had a small label in the corner. I pulled a drawer out at random, revealed dozens of brown and green beetles pinned to cork under a sheet of glass. Family Scarabaeidae, subfamily Cetoniinae, genus Cotinis, a large label informed me helpfully.

Some of the beetles had cream-colored stripes around the base of their shells, others had subtle brown stripes across their backs. All of them shimmered as I tilted the drawer lightly, the green glittering brightly, then dulling back down depending on the angle.

I slid the drawer back in. The label in the corner read SC-C. S for Scarab, C for Cetoniinae, C for Cotinis? I selected another drawer, this one labeled LL-L and tugged it partway out, then laughed with delight. Stag beetles. I always loved stag beetles. Our giant native variety likes damp, decomposing wood, which is also what many of our native orchids like, so I had encountered them numerous times while out with Father. The male stag beetles look terrifying, with their huge mandibles like nutcrackers, but their actual bite is more like a pinch—startling if you aren’t expecting it, but thoroughly underwhelming given their fierce appearance. (Mind you, I’ve known people like that too.) I turned slowly in a circle. There were a good thirty cabinets surrounding a large central table with books stacked upon it. I spared a sympathetic thought for Jackson’s back, lugging all that furniture into place, but mostly what I felt was glee.

I spent a happy hour pulling out drawers and inspecting the contents.

The collection was mostly of American insects, so I recognized many old friends (and occasionally old enemies). Beetles, weevils, dragonflies, damselflies … crane flies, with their legs mostly detached and scattered on the floor of the tray … Not all of the collection was in terribly good repair, alas, nor were the labels as thorough as one might wish. One drawer,

marked simply L, held dozens of loose, translucent envelopes that slid and slithered across one another as the drawer moved. Each one contained a single dried butterfly. A few of the envelopes had scrawled writing on the outside—I recognized Halder’s cramped handwriting—but the majority were blank.

Collected, and then he told himself he’d organize them later, I bet. Every naturalist I’ve ever known had done it at one time or another, and then discovered their memory was not so good as they thought, and they no longer had any idea under what circumstances it had been collected. The good ones learned. The other ones … well, possibly they papered their butterflies and shoved them in a drawer to deal with later.

Still, it wasn’t my place to judge Halder’s collection methods. I had a job to do. I consulted the first name on my list of illustrations. Cochliomyia hominivorax. Now let me see, that’d be … err … something-something,

dash C.

Um.

It occurred to me that what I really, really needed was an index.

The next hour was much less happy than the first. There wasn’t an index.

What had initially looked like a promising stack of books turned out to be the collected periodicals of a journal called The American Entomologist. I flipped through and found that it was very much not the sort of publication that would (to take an example completely at random) tell a layperson what the metathorax was.

I sat back with a groan. Halder probably hadn’t bothered to index it because he knew where everything was. He only needed the shorthand labels to make things easier. Probably one cabinet was flies and one was ants and one was beetles and … well, no, probably more than one had to be beetles. There are a lot of beetles in the world.

And honestly, that sort of loose organization would have worked fine for me, if I had any idea what sort of insect I was looking for in the first place.

But what was a Cochliomyia hominivorax? Was it a beetle or a butterfly, an ant or an antlion? I had no more idea of that than of where a metathorax went.

No, if I wanted to find the damn thing, I was either going to have to ask Halder, or start pulling out drawers.

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and started pulling out drawers.

Two hours later—some of which was spent finding a stepladder so that I could reach the collections at the top of the cabinets—I located C. hominivorax in a narrow tray labeled DC-C. I pulled out the drawer, stared into it, then closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool wood of the cabinet, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

They looked exactly like houseflies. The only reason I knew they weren’t is because houseflies are Musca domestica, and the only reason I knew that was because Father used to feed them to his Venus flytraps, and every single time, he would announce, “Musca domestica for your enjoyment, ladies.” (Possibly this tells you something about my father.) I sighed heavily and descended the ladder, clutching my tray of not- actually-houseflies. I set it on the table and stared at them. There were larvae in there as well, larger than the adults as often seems to happen. They were lined up neatly along the bottom, preserved in tiny glass bottles, small to large. The largest of the larvae were most of an inch long and had an odd spiral ridge that ran their entire length. It was like looking at a small, fleshy screw.

“Delightful,” I muttered. Well, that was tomorrow’s problem. At the moment, I had a fly to paint.

The study table included a magnifying glass. I fetched my sketchbook and my pencils and my tiny plein air watercolor palette, and set to work.

After a time, I selected one specific specimen, lifted it carefully from the tray, and examined it under the magnifying glass. Except for a distinct blue tinge, it still looked like a housefly to me. I wished I had better light, but Halder had been very clear that removing specimens from the library was a sin tantamount to murder.

There is a certain intimacy to examining a study specimen. You are studying parts much more closely than the animal presumably ever did on its own. Eventually you start to assign a certain amount of personality to them. (Well, I do, anyway. Other people may not.)

Hominivorax … hominivorax … “I shall call you Rex,” I told the specimen.

“Pleased to be working with you, Miss Wilson,” I answered for him, in a high buzzy voice. “I look forward to a fruitful collaboration.” (Look, if you can’t amuse yourself by making the specimens talk, you’re in the wrong field.) “So do I, Rex.” I sketched out the arrangement of his legs. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what your metathorax is?”

“I’ll never tell!” Rex squeaked.

“You’re a cad.”

“What are you gonna do, kill me and put me on a pin?”

“No, I’ll—”

A cough came from the doorway. I looked up guiltily to see Mrs. Kent standing there, watching me as if I had lost my mind.

“Err,” I said, hastily setting the fly down.

“I came up to see if you wanted lunch in the kitchen or if I should bring you up a tray,” she said.

“Oh. Uh. I’ll come down in just a minute. Let me just … err … finish up here.”

She nodded, so clearly not commenting on my behavior that it was practically a comment on its own. The floorboards creaked as she made her way back down the hall.

“This is all your fault,” I muttered to Rex, and imagined a squeaky snicker in return.

Painting Rex the fly took me nearly two days. It shouldn’t have, but I was most of the way through when I stopped to compare my work to my predecessor’s burying beetle, and had to start over in despair. In the end, I did not so much finish as realize that I had passed the point of diminishing returns and was now just making things worse.

This sort of thing happens a great deal in illustration, and I had been doing it long enough that I usually knew when to stop. Unfortunately,

between the new position and the terrifyingly high bar set by the previous painter, I had listened too much to my own anxieties.

It’s as good as it’s going to be. I need to stop. If this is not the quality that he wanted, he may fire me if he wishes, but I cannot do better than this.

I was gloomily aware that I had failed to meet the standard set by my predecessor. Even if I hadn’t been, a quick glance at the pages on the worktable would have shown me. My fly was competent and workmanlike, but it did not look as if it might suddenly walk off the page.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. I could not force myself to be a genius.

If artists could do that … well, we would be a very different breed.

The hallway leading to Halder’s office seemed twice as long, and yet I was still at the door far before I was ready. I knocked and stepped inside.

“I have a sample for you, Doctor,” I said. My voice didn’t shake. I was rather proud of that.

“Very well. Let’s see what you have.” He held out his hand and I offered him the page, my hand trembling in a way that my voice had not.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice.

He gave Rex a cursory glance, grunted, and pulled out his own magnifying glass. I clasped my hands behind my back to keep from wringing them, digging my nails under the opposite cuffs. My fingers felt like ice against my wrists.

“Bristles on the meron,” he murmured, “longitudinal stripes on the thorax … yes. Competently done, Miss Wilson. Maintain this standard, and we shall have no difficulties.” He held the page out to me. I blinked at him, then down at the fly.

Some part of me wanted to ask if he was certain, or if he was looking at the right image. Did he not see how shoddy it was compared to the work of my predecessor? Couldn’t he tell that this was merely competent?

If it had been anyone else, I would have thought that he was lying to spare my feelings. But this was Halder, who, so far as I could tell, possessed the personal warmth of a guinea worm.

“Make certain that you do not confuse the larvae with any other fly,” he added, not looking up. “The screwworm is distinctive and must be illustrated with great accuracy. The mechanism of its burrowing is one central to my thesis.”

I swallowed. So this was the adult form of a screwworm, the bane of livestock throughout the region. I had not realized. “This is the variety that attacks cattle?” I asked.

“Cattle, sheep, horses, us—anything that it can lay eggs in. Hominivorax is not picky about its diet.” He smiled crookedly. It was not a pleasant smile. “It is one of the few insects that we know of that prefers to devour the living but will feast on the dead as well. It is a delightfully efficient little beast. The female lays eggs in nostrils, eyes, and open wounds, and once the larvae hatch, they burrow as deeply as they can, seeking live flesh. You have perhaps half a day to wash the eggs away before they hatch. I have heard of newborns suffering infestations in the stump of the umbilical cord when they were not bathed properly in the first days after birth.”

“Good god,” I said, appalled. Rex was apparently a bloodthirsty little monster.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness, Miss Wilson, or so they say. But foulness provides rather more opportunity for scientific inquiry.” His smile grew, showing teeth. “You are most privileged, Miss Wilson. Your work may contribute, in some small way, to my life’s dream of the eradication of monsters that have preyed upon us for centuries. Now, was there anything else you wanted?”

“No, Doctor,” I murmured, and fled, feeling my skin crawling as if there were already eggs laid upon it.

Painting the C. hominivorax larva was, in some ways, much easier than the adult fly. In other ways though, it was obnoxious. Alcohol from the preservation process tends to bleach everything out, so I could never be sure of getting the colors quite right. Sure, it was white and fleshy, but was it the correct white and fleshy?

It’s possible to preserve many insect larvae by pinning them, but since you have to remove the internal organs to keep them from rotting, they tend to collapse. Then you must reinflate them, using one of a number of patented caterpillar inflaters. It’s worth it for things like caterpillars, where the color patterns are so important, but hardly anyone bothers with maggots.

(I learned this, incidentally, over the course of a ten-minute lecture from Halder when I went to ask about the colors. I went back to my rooms and said, “Patented caterpillar inflater,” out loud several times and laughed so hard that Sally came to check on me.) Nevertheless, after a great deal of lifting pigment and dabbing tiny smidges of gouache, I had something that bore more than a passing resemblance to the screwworm larva. I presented it to Halder, my stomach knotting almost as badly as the first time. This is it, this is the one, he’s going to look at it and think it’s just a blob and … “Acceptable,” Halder said. “You need not bother with the eggs of this species.” He gazed at the image thoughtfully. “Do you know why it’s called a screwworm?”

“Uh…” I glanced at the page in his hand. “Because the spiral ridge resembles a screw?”

Halder grinned unpleasantly. “Indeed it does. As it burrows, those ridges anchor themselves in living flesh using tiny bristles. They become nearly impossible to extract. After a week, they burrow outward and fall to the ground, where they pupate into the next generation.” He reached out and tapped the jar on his desk. I glanced toward it and realized that the grubs inside were now familiar. Dead screwworms. Hundreds of them.

“Ah,” I said.

“Most interestingly, killing the host does not kill the screwworm. It will simply continue to eat. Few other parasites survive the death of their host in

such a way.”

“Fascinating,” I said faintly.

“It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them. I have already determined the optimal way to extract them from living flesh with the least damage. My monograph on the subject is even now in circulation. But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.”

He took my illustrations, rose, and locked them in the cupboard in his office. I felt a brief, nonsensical pang at seeing my work squirreled away like that. Don’t be absurd. What are you going to do, hang your art of screwworms on the wall? Show it off to Mrs. Kent?

I made a checkmark next to C. hominivorax and started on the next name on the list.

Esther, my old roommate, had asked me once if I liked painting. I must have looked at her oddly, because she colored up and said, “I don’t like teaching French. I know French, but I don’t like it.”

I told her that I loved painting, and then, out of both truth and sympathy, admitted that I didn’t like teaching it very much. Esther fell back into her chair with exaggerated relief and embarked on a tirade about how people don’t understand that being good at something does not mean that you have any skill at teaching it to other people. She was quite right, of course, but the question that stuck with me was the first one—did I like painting?

Despite what I told Esther years ago, I didn’t always know the answer.

Some things I loved painting. I could be on my deathbed and I would still leap up at the chance to paint a pitcher plant. The veins, the little translucent windows, the lids with their flares and ruffles … I found them endlessly delightful. Sometimes I even dreamed about doing a book of my own on the topic, though finding a publisher willing to risk money was the hard part.

Other things … well, I was good at painting, and I liked doing something I was good at. But with some subjects, it felt more like a bodily function than a grand passion. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It was just what I did.

The insects rapidly began to feel like that. I got up in the morning, I ate, I hunched over a tray of pinned flies, I sketched them out, I applied color. I could not have said that I was enjoying the work, but it was a great deal better than teaching had been. Occasionally I would manage a particularly fine sheen on a wing, and I would feel a certain artistic smugness. This would usually last until I glanced at my predecessor’s carrion beetle paintings, which took any of my pretensions and stomped them flat. I would go down to lunch. I would present Halder with the painting. I would start the next one.

Halder seemed content with my work. I started to think that perhaps he was simply not very exacting, until I handed him a Necrophila rufithorax where the elytron was not sufficiently truncated—at least, that’s what I think he yelled—and he flung it back at me with a curt order to do it again, correctly this time. I slunk back to the studio, feeling about three inches tall, and spent an entire day doing sketches of the sample beetles in the case, wondering what an elytron was. I thought it might be the wing case? Their wings varied a bit, as it turned out, so I simply picked one and set about

duplicating it exactly. Apparently the second time, it was sufficiently truncated, because Halder grunted, “Better,” and went back to his papers.

I still had no idea what a metathorax was.

My only break in the routine came on Sunday, when Mrs. Kent went to church. She told me what time we were leaving in the morning, with an obvious assumption that of course I was coming, so I put on my best remaining dress and was ready at the appointed hour. (Sunday service was mandatory at the school, of course. I had rarely gone to church when Father was alive. “Nature is better than any sermon,” he told me frequently, “and how better to honor the Lord than admiring His creation?” This was solid transcendentalist philosophy, though the fact that it allowed him to sleep in on Sundays and then go looking for interesting plants in the afternoon was not entirely lost on me.) It was a Black church, and Jackson and I were the only white people there, but everyone greeted me kindly. The service itself was brutally long, by my (admittedly lax) standards, but afterwards, there was an immense community meal. Two older ladies, hearing that I was working for Halder, made pained noises and urged me to sit right down next to them, poor child, how was I holding up?

Their sympathy was far more comforting than I expected. Mrs. Kent was one of those aggressively competent souls who make you feel less competent simply by comparison, and while Jackson was entertaining company, I only saw him at dinner and sometimes not even then. Having two people ask, with every evidence of genuine interest, how I was managing in that big empty house with that peculiar man—good heavens, the stories they could tell!—and nobody but Rose Kent to talk to—not a word against Rose, no, certainly not, but such a serious girl … “Not that anyone wouldn’t be serious,” the one on the right said, “with her poor mother going the way she did.”

“Lost her memory,” the one on the left said to me, “the poor dear. Would get lost in her own house by the end. Of course poor Rose couldn’t move her, so she was stuck there, working for that doctor. Even after his poor wife —”

Her companion slapped her on the arm with a napkin, interrupting the torrent of poors. “Jackson, good to see you!” she sang out.

“I see Miss Wilson has found the two loveliest ladies here,” Jackson said, sitting down at the table opposite me. Both of them laughed and all three embarked on an intense discussion of the weather as it related to gardening, which was doubtless satisfying for the participants, but left me with a severe case of gossipus interruptus.

Even after his poor wife what? Died? Left? Ran off to Paris to become a

burlesque dancer? … Was drained by blood thieves?

Since I wasn’t going to get answers, I settled on getting a second helping of pulled pork, which was almost as satisfying.

I hadn’t realized that I’d been feeling lonely and a bit cast down until we left and I realized that I felt better. (It didn’t hurt that I was stuffed full of incredible food.) I leaned back against the bench of the wagon and closed my eyes, soaking in the spring sunlight and thinking that I had probably made the right choice in taking this job after all.

The sunlight, alas, did not last. Rain blew up that night and continued for three days. I huddled in the studio while rain splatted against the windows and wind rattled the doors. It was not nearly as windy as Wilmington had been, so the rattling didn’t bother me, although the thrashing branches on the nearby trees rather did. Jackson assured me that this “warn’t nothin’” and then regaled me with tales of past storms that had brought down massive oaks and how he had personally had to chop apart a tree with a trunk “near as tall as Sally here.”

Sally giggled. Jackson mimed swinging an axe. “Took two days,” he said proudly. “Had to cut it in two places and then hitch up Buckshot and roll the damn thing out of the way.”

“And spent four days afterward laying around moaning ’cause you couldn’t lift your arms over your head,” said Mrs. Kent tartly, sliding hotcakes onto her husband’s plate. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that bit.”

Jackson blew her a kiss and grinned, unrepentant. I felt a stab of envy for them both. It would be nice to have someone else who was always on my side. My father had been, of course, but years alone had only softened the

edges of that pain, not erased it. I lingered in the kitchen, running my finger around the edge of my coffee mug, reluctant to leave that oasis of light and warmth for the cold, watery light of the studio.

Jackson pushed back from the table, then paused. “Oh, Miss Wilson. I’ll be going into town once I can ride instead of swim, and if there’s aught you need me to pick up for you at the general store, just let me know.”

“I would love that,” I said, “but I’m afraid I … err…” I lifted my hands helplessly. I didn’t have enough money for more than penny candy, and probably not much of that.

“Which reminds me,” said Mrs. Kent, wiping her hands on her apron.

“It’s the end of the month tomorrow, and you’re due your pay.”

“I am?” I said, heard the questioning note in my voice, and tried again.

“I mean, I am, yes.” Jackson chuckled at that, but his wife gave him a quelling look.

“You are, and don’t think I’ll let that tightfist upstairs forget it,” she said.

“Jackson takes the wage money out of the bank when he’s there, so if there’s something you want, he’ll bring you the change.”

“Without so much as a broker’s fee,” he promised.

“I would love enough fabric for a new dress,” I said, with real longing.

“It doesn’t have to be fancy, but just so I’m not wearing the same two all the time.”

“Pfff,” said Mrs. Kent. “Is that all? If you don’t mind dressing like Sally and me, there’s still uniforms in storage from the days when we had a full staff here.” She eyed me. “You can probably alter one or two to fit you, if you’re decent with a needle, and if not, I know a lady who can do it for a

fair price.”

“I can do it.”

“Then find me when I’m finished here, and I’ll take you to see what we’ve got.”

An hour later, Mrs. Kent led me to a back corner of the house, lighting candles as we went. It was clear that this was not regularly visited. The air smelled of floor wax. We stepped into a storeroom which, while neatly kept, was clearly where household goods went to die. There were neat rows of storm windows lining one wall and folded stacks of furniture covers, but there were also chairs that needed the seats re-caned, spare tin ceiling tiles, and enough chamber pots to accommodate a small weak-bladdered army.

Mrs. Kent threaded her way through these piles to a closet with double doors. The smell of mothballs rolled out, and she lifted a candle, revealing long shelves covered in fabric.

“Good heavens,” I said blankly, staring at the rows of folded dresses and aprons. “You could dress every girl back at the school twice over.”

“Supposed to be a dozen servants here,” said Mrs. Kent, “just for the house itself.” She leaned against the doorjamb. “That’s why the whole place is in dustcovers. Can’t keep it up, just with me and Sally. It’s all we can do just to air everything and make sure it doesn’t go to mold and mildew.”

I shook my head. “It’s such a big house. Why aren’t there more people?”

Mrs. Kent snorted. “The doctor hasn’t got that many friends, nor family either.”

“Yet he built this place…” I glanced over my shoulder, down the hall, at all the closed doors. Behind them, furniture slept under sheets and wallpaper faded quietly in the sun. “I wonder why?”

“It wasn’t his money that built it,” Mrs. Kent muttered, then snapped her mouth closed as if she regretted saying so much. “Anyway, pick out anything close to your size and leave it outside your door. I’ll see that it’s washed and ready for altering.” She turned away, her heels clicking on the boards, before I could ask whose money had built the house, and where exactly that money had come from.

“Jackson?”

Rain had given way at last to a clear, pleasant morning, and I tracked Mr.

Kent down in the vegetable garden just outside the formal grounds. He looked up from where he was staking up tomato plants that had flopped over in the rain. “Hey there, Miss Wilson. Thought of what you need from

town? I’ll be going this afternoon.”

“Indeed.” I proffered a short list.

“… Ah,” he said, making no move to take it. “Should have warned you, miss. I’m not much good with my letters.”

“Oh!” I put a hand over my mouth, embarrassed. “I’m sorry!”

He chuckled. “No, no, no need to fash yourself. My letters are bad but my memory’s top-notch. Just you tell me what you want and I’ll go looking.”

“Socks,” I said with a sigh. “I cannot knit socks to save my life. Tooth powder. And … er…” I scuffed one foot in the rich earth just off the garden path. A small green weed had poked its head up, and was promptly flattened, although it looked like plantain, and nothing keeps plantain down for long. “If they happen to have some penny candy…”

“Miss Wilson, I am shocked.” He put his hands on his hips. “Are you telling me that our fine young scientist has a sweet tooth?”

“Not at all. I’m … err … conducting an experiment. On the effects of candy on mood.” I caught the edge of his grin. “It’s a very long-running experiment.” Back in Wilmington, there had been a fine candy shop two streets over, and it was a rare week that I didn’t acquire at least one peppermint stick. In all other respects, I was eating infinitely better now than I had been, but I did miss the occasional taste.

“Happy to oblige,” he said cheerfully. “Socks, tooth powder, penny candy. Anything else?”

I considered. This was the first time I’d spoken to Jackson without his wife present, after all. “Actually, I had a question. I think the first night I was here, you said something about there not being anything scary in the woods anymore. What did you mean by that?”

“Ahhh.” Jackson pursed his lips. “Old gossip, mostly. You sure you want to hear about it?”

Under his reluctance, a born storyteller was clearly dying to hold forth. I leaned against the garden gate. “Absolutely. I don’t know these woods all that well, and anything you can tell me…” I trailed off, leaving a hopefully inviting silence.

He did not so much fill the gap as leap into it with both feet. “First thing you should know—my grandma, she was from the old country. Knew all the real old stories. At least, she said they were old stories, and nobody argued with Gran.”

I raised my eyebrows, wondering what this had to do with inhabitants of the local woods. “They must have been fascinating,” I said politely.

“Oh, aye, they were. But they weren’t about ghosties and goblins and little people, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He grinned. “She knew plenty

of those too, but so did everybody else. You can’t throw a rock out Asheville way without hitting an oldster who wants to tell you about leaving milk out for the other crowd. No, Gran told other stories. Like about Slith the thief and what happened to him, and the house where they hang two criminals from hooks and every now and then they come and take one down, when they find somebody who’s done something even worse, and they put that one up on the hooks instead. Or the village where they take turns bleeding people to feed the old women during a famine, so that the Mother of Winter won’t take one over.”

I must have looked aghast at this, because Jackson lifted a hand and laughed self-consciously. “You see what I mean? They used to give me nightmares, some of ’em, but Gran said that just showed I was sensible. My mam didn’t see it quite the same way, always tried to stop me from listening, so of course I snuck off every chance I got to listen, didn’t I?”

This, at least, struck me as entirely logical, even if I didn’t see how it related to whatever had gone on in the woods. “I certainly would have.”

“There, you see? Girl after my own heart. Thing is…” He glanced toward the house, as if expecting his wife to appear and scold him. Not seeing her, he pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear and lit it. “Well, maybe ten years back, some bad stuff started happening. Felt like it came straight out of one of Gran’s stories. The war’d been over a few years by then, and Rose and I had just moved back here to take care of her mam.

Animals started turning up dead, all cut up strange, and then every now and then a person’d turn up that way too. They thought it was some kind of animal, maybe a cougar, but it sure wasn’t like any cougar I ever heard of.”

“Cut up strange how?” I asked.

He spread his hands helplessly. “Looked like somebody took a sharp knife and went to work. You’d find ’em up in a tree, head down, like somebody was draining ’em out. Cougar will drag things up into a tree sometimes, and they like a throat bite, so okay, not the worst suggestion. ’Cept I never heard tell of a cougar that hamstrung its dinner first. And they definitely don’t bite out both wrists and then the neck too.”

“Good god!”

“Yeah. People were spooked.” Jackson gestured with the cigarette, the red ember tracing a line through the air. “Lotsa bad blood got riled up.

Some people thought it was the Klan, but it wasn’t showy enough for them, you ask me.”

“So what was it?” I asked, ignoring the whisper in my head saying: Blood thieves, Sally told you, they drain your blood away … Jackson shrugged. “Never found out. You ask me, it was something smart though. It’d get real bad for a little while and people would get themselves all worked up in a frenzy, then it’d ease off, like maybe whatever was doing it had gone off somewhere else. So everybody would start to relax a little and then a season or two later, dead animals would start turning up again. Kept happening over and over. Not just like dogs or pigs either, but wild stuff. You’d come across deer or even possums like that, except most of the time you couldn’t be sure because the vultures would get to ’em first, and after that, ain’t nobody gonna be able to tell how they died.

Some people started to wonder if maybe there wasn’t a lot more of it happening than we knew about.”

I considered this. That certainly didn’t sound like a cougar, granted, but then again, people are notorious for thinking that wild animal bites are actually knife wounds, and a lot of them don’t understand that when, say, a fox kills a rabbit, there’s rarely much blood. It was entirely possible that there’d been one or two real attacks and then a whole string of panicky encounters with perfectly normal carcasses.

“Anyhow.” Jackson flicked the cigarette away. “It made me think of Gran’s stories. Lot of ’em were about blood. People who maybe weren’t all the way human, who fed on blood. They used to say that if you ate a wolf’s brain, you’d get the ability to change your skin for his, but you’d have a hunger on you ever after. And even around here, there were stories about dead people coming back for the people they loved, and drinking them dry so they kept coming back.”

My expression must have been obviously skeptical, because Jackson snorted. “I know, it sounds like a lot of hogwash. The missus gets mad if I bring it up. But I saw some of those bodies and I don’t mind telling you, there was something very strange going on there.”

“Oh?” I asked, trying to keep the disbelief out of my voice.

“Indeed there was. The deer were funny enough, but there was an old woman named Martha Glint. Nasty piece of work, and I can’t say I was terrible broken up. Never forgave any Black soul for bein’ freed, and the

stories about what she did to people before the war would turn your stomach. Found her myself, halfway up a tree, white as a sheet, with her throat tore out and one wrist bit near through. And hardly any blood on the ground under her either.”

I winced at the image. “Still,” I said, after a moment, “she could have bled out somewhere else and been dragged there. And cougars do stash their prey in trees sometimes.”

“Funny sort of cougar that unbuttons a lady’s collar and folds back the

cuffs on her sleeves though.”

I stared at him, silenced.

“Oh, aye,” Jackson said. “There was a bit of a fracas not long after that.

Coupla men—that Phelps fellow was one of ’em—found two people living rough in the woods out Bynum way. White kids, barely outta their teens I’d guess, but real strange-like, they said. Real bad. Caught ’em in the middle of draining out a deer, and from what I hear, it wasn’t the meat they were after.”

I saw the Devil in these woods, Miss Wilson … “They strung ’em up, but that wasn’t enough. They put stakes in ’em like they used to do in the old days when they dug up a coffin and found somebody in it looking a little too pink-cheeked and rosy. Then they buried ’em deep. And after that, bodies stopped turning up, so seemed like maybe they got the people responsible.”

“You don’t sound so sure about that,” I said.

Jackson dusted off his hands and lifted the latch on the gate. “I don’t know to say otherwise. I didn’t see what those men saw. For all I know, that couple was sittin’ on top of a barrel of blood and pickin’ their teeth with the bones. All I know is that afterward, Phelps took to the Bible like some men take to the bottle.”

There was a “but” hanging in the air so obviously that it might as well have been written in letters of fire. I obliged. “But?”

“Seems to me that something smart enough to lay low for a season or two when things got too hot might be smart enough to move on completely in a case like that.” Jackson grinned like a fox, all sharp teeth and faded red hair. “Anyhow, that was ’bout three years ago. Wouldn’t fret yourself now.

Much.”

I recognized the grin as that of a storyteller who knows that he’s succeeded in filling his audience with nameless dread. I scowled at him, which only made the grin spread wider. “Time to head into town,” he said.

“Socks, tooth powder, penny candy. Right?”

“Right.” I followed him out of the garden, mind still churning with stories of blood and predators that could unbutton a collar. But I wasn’t superstitious, and I certainly didn’t believe in blood thieves. The fact that Sally’s mother still thought they might be about didn’t prove anything. “It’s a shame that there wasn’t a naturalist around to get to the bottom of it,” I murmured.

Jackson shut the gate and turned back to me. “Oh, but there was,” he said. “Wasn’t just Phelps who was in at the death. Dr. Halder was there too.”

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