Wolf Worm — Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

The clear weather seemed to be sticking around and I seized the opportunity to work on the balcony. It was a beautiful workspace. Seated at the table, all I could see were tree branches and a sea of leaves, which rustled and sighed and shifted like women rearranging green petticoats. The overhanging roof kept direct sun at bay for most of the day but it was bright and open and airy.

Sadly, the improved light made me stare at my current illustration— Nicrophorus marginatus, the margined burying beetle—and realize that all the colors were much too bright, the shell was more blue than black, and that I was an utter fraud at all forms of artistic endeavor. (This is a normal part of the illustrator’s process, but sadly, knowing that does not always help.) Only great discipline and the knowledge that Halder probably wouldn’t notice kept me from wadding the painting into a ball and flinging it into the woods.

I got out my sketchbook and studied my notes, returned to the library to study the beetle, went back to the balcony, looked at my sketchbook, looked at my paints, and wondered if it was too late to run away to join the circus.

It wasn’t just the paint. I couldn’t stop thinking about Halder and blood thieves in the woods. Or the Devil, if Phelps was to be believed. I told myself fiercely to concentrate on the task at hand. Margined burying beetles. Focus on margined burying beetles.

The beetles didn’t put a stake through whatever they were burying. A stake! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you’d think this was the 1600s. And Halder let them?

I wanted desperately to ask him about it, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up. If I just asked him outright, he’d know that Jackson or Sally had

told me. Would he be angry? Could it rebound on them somehow? I had no idea, but Halder hadn’t exactly impressed me as a bastion of good cheer. If it was something he was ashamed of (and how could he not be ashamed?

Letting superstition run rampant like that—staking the bodies, for god’s sake) he might take it out on his employees. We were so isolated here, I didn’t dare risk jeopardizing the only friendly faces I saw regularly.

At that moment, as I slumped despairingly against the worktable, an insect landed on my left wrist.

For a moment I thought it was a giant bee. It was at least an inch long, black with rusty yellow patches. I froze, not wanting to prompt it into a sting. But as it turned, I saw the enormous compound eyes and realized that it was, in fact, a fly.

“Now you’re an odd beast,” I murmured. What was it? I was vaguely familiar with giant robber flies, which look similar, but it didn’t seem quite the same. Halder would probably be able to tell me, if I can catch it. But will he be annoyed or happy to be asked?

I suspected that Halder would be only too glad to display his expertise, but of course, I had to catch the creature first. I had been cleaning my brushes in a jar of water on the table. I reached for it very slowly, not wanting to startle the insect, and emptied it as quietly as possible, trying not to move my wrist.

The fly rubbed its front legs together thoughtfully. Its yellow patches were as fuzzy as any bumblebee, shading to a deep red at the back of the head. Its abdomen was glossy black, and I still didn’t know where its metathorax was, or if it even possessed one. As I slowly lifted the jar, it pressed its abdomen against my wrist several times, as if dancing.

I slapped the jar down, mouth over the fly, and crowed with triumph.

“Got you!”

The fly jumped up, buzzing against the glass, then dropped back down.

It was only a moment’s work to ease my hand out and slide my sketchbook underneath, though I was surprised by how strongly it flailed against the glass.

I might be an utter failure as an illustrator, but by god, I was sneakier than a large fly. I took my captive into the house and made my way to Halder’s study.

“Hmph,” said Dr. Halder, peering through his glasses at my captive. “Oh, a Cuterebra. Botfly. Also called ‘wolf worms.’ Parasitic on mammals.”

“Parasitic?” I asked, looking dubiously at the fly through the glass.

“Oh yes.” He grinned unpleasantly. “Nasty fellows, botflies. They lay their eggs in burrows—the ones that don’t lay eggs on their hosts directly— and then the larva hatches out, waits for a host to walk by, latches on, and climbs inside. Mouth, nose, anus, open wound, they don’t discriminate.

Once inside, they wander until they find a spot just beneath the skin and begin to feed on the host’s fluids. Proper little monsters, they are.”

I stared down at my wrist in sudden horror. Had it been laying eggs on me? Were tiny maggots even now making their way across my skin?

“Deer botflies, now, they don’t even wait for the animal to pass by—the female ejects her larvae directly into the nasal passages of the victim, where they form clusters at the base of the tongue. This, however, is likely Cuterebra emasculator.” Halder tapped the glass. “Forms enormous warbles on the sides of squirrels that hang there like grapes, each one with a single large maggot inside. Then one day the larva squirms loose and turns into a fly, who goes off looking for a mate, lays eggs, and then her larvae find a victim for their appetites.”

“Blood thieves…” I murmured, half to myself.

Halder pushed his glasses up, giving me an odd look. “Not blood,” he said. “They feed primarily on the lymphatic fluids.”

I have a very strong stomach—all scientific illustrators must, I think, as we work so often from study skins and preserved specimens that reek of formaldehyde—but the description of warbles hanging like grapes from a squirrel, and the thought that I might wind up with one actually on me … My mouth flooded with bile. “Excuse me,” I said in a strangled voice, and lunged for the basin in the corner, scrubbing frantically at my wrist where the fly had touched me.

Halder laughed. It was the first time I think I’d heard him laugh, high and braying, like a soprano donkey. I hated him for it, but I didn’t stop scrubbing. It was a small comfort when his laugh turned into a coughing fit.

I hope it carries you off, you miserable old sod.

No, I don’t, I need this job. Damnation.

“You needn’t worry,” he said, once he’d recovered, and I’d scoured both arms from fingertip to the elbow. “This species don’t usually latch onto humans.”

“It’s the usually part that worries me,” I snapped.

Halder snorted. “Now, Cuterebra emasculator, as it happens, is a particularly fine example of human idiocy. Described in the middle of the century by that overrated hack Asa Fitch. ‘The country’s first professional entomologist,’ they call him. They’d have been better served by amateurs!”

His fist thumped down on the table, making the papers on it and the jar with the fly both jump. “The fool named it ‘emasculator’ because he said the maggots chewed the squirrel’s testicles off. They do no such thing, as he could easily have seen if he’d taken five minutes to catch a male squirrel with a warble on it! And yet those fools at the Megatherium Club still hold Fitch up as the greatest man since Thomas Say!” He thumped the table again.

“I know of Say, of course,” I said cautiously, “but I cannot say I have ever heard of Asa Fitch.” (This was true, although I admit that I mostly knew about Thomas Say, famed naturalist, because one of my father’s friends had named his bull snake Tommy in the man’s honor. I decided not to mention that to Halder.) The doctor harrumphed, but seemed mollified. He gazed back down at the fly in the jar, which seemed to cheer him. “You might illustrate the Cuterebra next,” he suggested. “Since you have such a fine specimen to work with.”

My skin crawled at the thought, but what could I do? “I’ll do that,” I said grimly.

Halder’s grin spread on either side of his weevil-like nose. “There’s a stack of killing jars in the library.”

I nodded, collected my specimen, and fled the room.

The botfly bumped against the glass. I glared at it. “All right, then,” I told it. “I suppose it’s you and me now. Let’s get this over with…”

Ironically, the next wild creature to alarm me was a member of my own taxonomic class, Mammalia. I was hunched over a sheet of watercolor paper, trying to add fractional amounts of deep red into the botfly’s fur, when I heard a scuffle of bark from the nearby trees.

I glanced up, expecting to see one of the countless gray squirrels that made their homes overhead, and instead found myself gazing into the masked face of a raccoon.

I started back, then hastily set the brush down before I could splash Tuscan red across a nearly finished illustration that had cost me so much labor. “Well, hello,” I said, amused. “What are you doing out so early?”

The raccoon stared back at me, clinging to the trunk of a sweet gum tree.

Leaves cast a shifting shadow across its mask. I could not quite make out its eyes.

Slowly, as we studied each other, my amusement began to lessen. I’d encountered any number of raccoons before, of course. You can hardly wander the woods on the East Coast without meeting a few, and they love nothing more than to get into trash and make a dreadful mess. I had no fear of them, but a healthy respect. Despite their adorable looks, they have a savage bite if they feel threatened. Most of the time though, they’ll go out of their way to avoid conflict. (Well, unless you’re a chicken. They adore conflict with chickens, and the chickens rarely come off well.) Something about this one looked … off.

Its fur lay in stiff clumps along its sides and chest. I would have guessed that it had been in the water recently, but it looked greasy rather than wet.

Was it sick?

Rabies? While you do sometimes see raccoons out in the daytime, an unhealthy animal out during the day set off alarm bells. There was no way that it could make the jump from the sweet gum to the balcony, but I eased myself to the edge of my chair anyway, ready to dodge back if it made any threatening moves.

It didn’t. In fact, it didn’t move at all. It just clung to the tree and stared at me.

At least it looked like it was staring. I couldn’t see the shine of its eyes, so for all I knew, it was taking a nap in my direction.

Or maybe it doesn’t have eyes. Maybe they’re gone. Or maybe it never had any and it’s just got blank fur growing over the sockets …

That was not a thought that I enjoyed having. I could see it all too clearly, a skull like one of the ones in the studio, but with smooth bone

where the orbits should be.

Stop that.

I wasn’t usually this fanciful. It was probably just left over from dealing with Halder and the dreadful botfly, and from hearing Jackson’s stories about bloodless bodies in the woods and God knew what else. It was ridiculous, scaring myself with things like that when rabies was scary enough already. I knew it was ridiculous. Rabies drove you foaming mad until you died in agony.

I wouldn’t be able to see foam at this distance. All I could make out was a pale blob on one side of its face, which might have been a scar or a patch of sunlight or a piece of bark stuck to its fur.

I was almost certain it couldn’t make the jump from the tree to the balcony.

“Right,” I said. “I’m just … going inside for a moment.” (Yes, it was very silly. I knew that even at the time. The raccoon certainly wasn’t going to be impressed with my bravado. It was purely childhood logic at work: as long as I didn’t run, it wouldn’t be able to chase me.) I stood up, nonchalantly gathered up my paints, balanced the half- finished fly atop them, and retreated at a decorous pace into the studio.

When I closed the door, I could see the raccoon still facing in my direction.

It hadn’t moved at all and I still couldn’t make out its eyes.

The next morning, when I came down to breakfast, there was a stranger at the table. She had the round, slightly jowly face that can be any age between forty and seventy, and I couldn’t tell what race she was. Generally around here that means people assume you’re Black, but I found myself reluctant to make that assumption either.

“Hezekiah Kersey,” she said, waving the edge of a shawl at me. She was bundled up in shawls as if it were January instead of the first week of May.

The shawls were all bright colors, red and green and purple, so she glowed like an orchid in the dimness of the kitchen. I would have to use color

straight out of the tube to paint the fabric, and layer the shadows carefully so as not to dim their richness. “But you can call me Ma Kersey. Ev’rybody else does, whether I birthed ’em or not.” She aimed a swat in Jackson’s general direction as she said it, which he ducked, laughing.

“You’re not old enough to have birthed me, Ma.”

“Flatterer.” She had two gold teeth that showed when she smiled.

“Sonia Wilson.” I extended a hand and she took it. Her grip was solid but brief, not trying to prove anything, maybe not thinking that anything needed proving.

“I hear you’ve come to draw up more pictures for the doctor’s book.”

I didn’t bother to ask where she’d heard that. Plenty of people gossip, but a certain sort of person can snatch gossip right out of the air, like a flycatcher bird grabbing an insect on the wing, and neither the gossip nor the insect knows what hit it. “I am. Lots of paintings of flies at the moment.” I tried to sound rueful and amused, even though I was still feeling a little unsettled from the Cuterebra yesterday. It had taken a very long time to finally die, and no matter how much I told myself that some of the ether in the killing jar must have evaporated, I didn’t quite believe it.

“Mmm.” She leaned back in her nest of shawls and studied me with dark, sharp eyes.

Mrs. Kent slid a poached egg and hotcakes and bacon onto Ma Kersey’s plate, and there was real maple syrup on the table. Mrs. Kent clearly thought highly of this guest. I used the syrup very sparingly, aware that I did not rank nearly so high, but the taste was like winter sunlight on my tongue.

“You cook just as good as your mama did,” Ma Kersey told Mrs. Kent, who ducked her head, looking both pleased and slightly annoyed, as if she didn’t want that to mean something. I ran the last bite of hotcake around my plate, trying to mop up any remaining molecules of syrup.

Ma Kersey leaned back in her chair with her coffee cup balanced atop her belly. I thought she was a big woman, but it was hard to tell under all the shawls. She caught my eye and grinned, gold teeth flashing. “Lumbee,”

she said.

“Pardon?”

“I’m Lumbee. You had that look on you, trying to figure out who my people are. There’s your answer. Came from over Robeson way, followed a

fellow here.” She took a sip of her coffee and added meditatively, “He’s

dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically.

“That makes one of us. Sweet as sugar for six months and mean as a snake for the next six years.” She held out her coffee cup into the air next to her with the absolute certainty that someone would fill it. Jackson hurried to do so. “But you,” Ma Kersey said, “you’re from out by Wilmington, I hear.”

Again, I didn’t bother wondering where she’d heard it. “That’s right.”

“Like it out here, do you?” Her eyes bored into me like surgical instruments, pulling out bits and holding them up to the light. “Or are you missing home?”

I had a distinct impression that there was a right and a wrong answer to this question, without knowing what they were. Who is this woman? I sipped my own coffee to buy some time while I formulated an answer. “I’m missing it less than I expected. I traveled a lot when my father was alive, so I’m used to being in new places.” That didn’t sound enthusiastic enough, so I added, “It’s so incredibly green here. It feels so alive.”

“That it is,” said Ma Kersey, “that it is. Alive and all of a piece. You shoot a rabbit on one side of the county and the grass on the other side knows about it by nightfall.”

Completely unscientific, but something about the way she said it gave me pause. Alive and all of a piece. Huh. But it was the mention of rabbits that really caught me. “That reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask…” I said.

Ma Kersey raised her eyebrows. “Well, go on, child, ask away.”

“When I came in on the train, there was a sign saying ‘Home of the World-Famous Chatham Rabbit.’ Why are the rabbits here world-famous?”

“Ha!” Ma Kersey slapped a shawl-covered knee. “You haven’t made your rabbit pie for the girl yet, Rose?”

Mrs. Kent pulled a face. “No, ’cause the boy who usually sells ’em to me started selling ’em in town instead. I pay more money, but I only want two or three, not thirty. They pot ’em up and ship ’em on to Raleigh now.”

Ma Kersey nudged Jackson. “And what’re you doing, young man, letting your wife’s larder sit empty?”

“Fixing up the fences to keep the rabbits out,” Jackson said plaintively.

“Doesn’t do much good to catch ’em after they’ve eaten all the veggies up

first.”

The old woman gave Jackson a stern look, though I could see the edge of a gold tooth showing as she did. Jackson hung his head. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “I’ll go catch some rabbits directly.”

“Good man.” Ma Kersey nodded and turned back to me. “Got a lot of rabbits out here,” she said. “Used to eat it four, five meals a week sometimes. Big ones too. After the war, a lot of fields stood empty, and there’s nothing a rabbit loves more. Out in Raleigh they say the best rabbit comes from Chatham County. With the railroad come through, I hear they even ship ’em clear up to New York!” She shook her head. “Suppose if you’re in the city, it seems fancy.”

Mrs. Kent moved to refill her coffee, but Ma Kersey put her hand over the cup. “Nah, time I was moving on. Just came by to drop off that stuff and get a look at the new girl.” She looked me up and down again. I was suddenly glad that I was wearing one of the dresses that I’d altered, even if the fabric was a good decade old.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Ma Kersey,” I said, rising when she did.

“Likewise, I’m sure.” Despite the twinkle in her eyes, I suspected that she hadn’t made up her mind about me. That was a trifle worrying. Women like Hezekiah Kersey are good to have on your side. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. Oh god, what if she tells everyone I’m a snob and turns people I haven’t even met yet against me?

I stamped down my anxiety. “I hope I’ll see you again,” I said, which was the truth.

“Oh, I’m sure you will.” She swatted at Jackson again, then took his arm and let him escort her out of the kitchen. I waited until I heard the door close before glancing back to Mrs. Kent.

“Whew.” The housekeeper leaned against the wall, dabbing at her forehead with her apron. She caught my look and said, “Don’t let her scare you, now. That was by way of a courtesy call. She mostly came so she can tell everybody that I didn’t forget how to cook.”

And you were scared that she might think otherwise, I thought, though I wasn’t fool enough to say it out loud. “She’s a bit … intimidating.”

“Lord, you can say that again. And the biggest gossip in the county.

Knows everybody’s business practically before they do. But I tell you this, what she doesn’t know about doctoring and delivering babies ain’t hardly

worth knowing.” Mrs. Kent plucked the syrup from the table and tucked it into a cupboard.

I went back to the studio in a thoughtful frame of mind. All of a piece … hmm. I thought of the story Jackson had told me about those bodies found in the woods, strung up and drained of their blood, and wondered what exactly Ma Kersey might have been able to add to it.

“Doctor?”

“Eh?” Halder looked up from his work, clearly annoyed at being disturbed. “What do you want?”

I left the door ajar behind me, feeling the need for an escape route. “I’m afraid I’ve run into a problem with the Cuterebra illustrations.”

The corners of the doctor’s mouth drew down. “What problem?”

“It’s Cuterebra approximata.”

“The deer mouse botfly,” said Halder. “What about it?”

“I can’t find a specimen in the library.”

“What?!” He rose halfway to his feet and I took a step back, startled.

“What do you mean, you can’t find it? It’s in there! Are you blind?”

I swallowed, my mouth dry. I had gone through every drawer that ended in -C, hunting for it, but had found nothing, not even an unlabeled specimen that looked vaguely like a botfly. “It is not in with the rest of the Cuterebras,” I said, in as neutral a voice as I could manage.

“Of course it is,” he snapped, pushing back from his desk. He brushed past me, moving more quickly than I had ever seen him move, and stormed toward the library.

I had placed the tray of botflies on the table. Halder went to it and looked down, breathing hard. Surely the walk could not have exhausted him so much? Was he so angry?

This is it, this is where he fires you, you should have checked again, he’ll point right at it … But he did not. Instead he stared down at the case, his fingertips moving over the glass. “Oh,” he said, in a much different voice. If it had been

anyone but Halder, I’d have said he sounded sheepish. “Damn it all. The carpet beetles got that one.”

I winced. Entomology may not be my strong suit, but every naturalist has heard of carpet beetles. They will happily devour clothes and bedding, but they positively adore taxidermy. One of my father’s rivals had lost half his collection to them. “He didn’t deserve that,” Father had said, even though he loathed the man in a cordial academic fashion. “Nobody deserves that.”

I could only imagine the havoc the beetles might wreak in a collection such as this one. I winced. “You had carpet beetles?”

“About a year ago,” he said, almost absently. “Normally I’d have caught it earlier, but I had other things on my mind.” He shook himself. “Base the illustration on the life studies, then.”

“Errr…” I swallowed again, worry giving way to confusion. “I haven’t done any life studies of approximata, Doctor.”

He swung around and stared at me. His eyes seemed oddly cloudy behind the enormous lenses. “No,” he said slowly. “No, what am I thinking? Not you.” His gaze sharpened. “Wait here,” he snapped, and stumped out of the room again.

I waited, baffled, beside the case of botflies. Like the one that I had caught, they were all thick-bodied, fuzzy creatures, looking halfway between a fly and a bumblebee. Deceptively fluffy and innocent for something that would burrow under your skin and drink your vital fluids.

Some had deep red eyes, others black. I had used colored pencil to get a properly grainy look on the compound eyes. Most likely that detail would not come out in the actual plates made from my illustrations, but that was beyond my control.

Halder returned with another folio, much thicker than the one he had shown me before. He thrust it at me, and I took it, startled. “In there,” he said, sounding irritable. “There’s sketches of it. Draw from those.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

He stared at me broodingly. I wondered if he was actually seeing me, or if his mind was still on the carpet beetles that had devoured his specimens.

Then he sniffed, turned on his heel, and stalked away.

I spread the contents of the folio out on the table. They were sketches, bound together with loops of string punched through one side. As I had

already guessed, they belonged to my predecessor.

Insects marched and flew across the pages in an endless parade, notes written in the margins in a small, feminine hand. Perhaps forty pages in all, the sketches ranging from quick gesture drawings to extremely detailed studies. I found the original sketches for the carrion beetle that had so impressed me, and a dozen more besides, for illustrations either never completed or that I had not seen.

Will you think less of me if I say that I was oddly relieved? The sketches were very good, but they did not have the almost supernatural quality that her paintings did. I could look at these drawings beside my own and not feel like an imposter.

The greatest gift, however, was not this boost to my confidence, nor even the studies for the deer mouse botfly, which I found near the end of the folio.

No, it was a hasty sketch of a bee, with a line pointing to a segment labeled “metathorax.” The backmost section of the thorax.

If the artist had been in front of me, I would have thrown my arms around her, kissed her cheeks, and called her sister. As it was, I slumped against the table, feeling wrung out with sudden relief. “Thank you,” I said to my absent predecessor. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The light was starting to fade. I returned the botflies to their drawer, took the sketches, and went to back to the studio. I felt the previous resident’s presence in the room, as always, but this time, thinking of metathoraxes, I didn’t mind at all.

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