Wolf Worm — Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Another Sunday came and went, with food and sympathy and a sermon that lasted nearly two hours. “Young preachers,” muttered the woman in the pew behind me. “Swear they forget that some of us got to pee on the regular.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Kent’s lips start twitching at that.

The food continued to be extraordinary and I continued to be pathetically grateful to talk to people that I didn’t see every single day.

That afternoon, I decided that I would go absolutely mad if I went back to work on the latest insect and went out in the garden again to sketch flowers. I could actually feel my jaw unclenching as I worked. I should do this more often.

“Why plants?” Esther, my roommate at the schoolhouse, had asked me once. “Why not something interesting?”

“Plants are interesting,” I said defensively. “They have evolved many fascinating mechanisms for—”

“Why not people?” she clarified. “You’re good enough that you could paint people and they’d pay money for it. Or, I don’t know, horses or dogs or something like that. Things people buy.”

“People buy pictures of plants.”

“People buy pictures of flowers,” Esther pointed out with ruthless accuracy. “Roses and peonies and whatnot. You’re painting weeds.”

At the time I had been doing a watercolor sketch of the crumpled leaves of a broadleaf plantain, which is indeed a weed. Its flower spike is greenish- purple and you have to look closely to even see the flowers themselves. “I like plants,” I said, knowing that she was right and that it would have been sensible to paint some peonies and see if I could sell them on my day off.

“For one thing, they stand still while you’re working, unlike some people.”

Which sent her off in a peal of laughter, because of course she was a terrible model, endlessly fidgeting, and my attempts to sketch her would end up with five different lines of mouth and ten different sets of arms.

“Fine, fine. You win. Enjoy your weeds.”

What I didn’t tell her, then or ever, was that plants were easy because they didn’t have to like you. People have to like you if you’re going to paint them. Animals, despite all the claptrap about the unconditional love of pets, have to like you. You have to move right and act right and have the right expressions or else they get skittish and start eyeing you as if you’re plotting something nefarious.

Plants don’t care about any of that. You can show up in a plant’s life for two hours and then go away and the plant goes on about its business without any change. You can’t say the wrong thing to a plant or startle it by sitting still for an hour and then moving suddenly.

And they are fascinating. Not just things like my Father’s Venus flytraps, which even Esther could appreciate, but the little low plants that hardly anyone cares about. When hairy bitter cress goes to seed, if you touch it, the seeds explode in all directions as if propelled by tiny springs. The maroon bells of pawpaw stink of carrion to attract flies that normally feed on rotten meat. (Halder probably knew all those flies by name.) Some people hang chicken bones from the pawpaw branches to attract more flies and get more fruit, so in spring the trees look like grisly wind chimes.

Unfortunately, it was hard to get a publisher to bite on a book of illustrations of things like that. Nice ladies don’t write odes to flowers that smell like rotting flesh. Esther was right, I’d probably have better luck with a book of peonies, or of different types of roses. Something that people could cut out and frame and hang on the wall. It was just that other people had already done that, so there was no reason for a publisher to take a chance on me. I had to find a different angle, and the angles available to respectable single women without a patron were extremely limited.

Still, if I did enough illustrations of various flowers, maybe I could figure something out. And here I had access to some marvelous materials, and if I used the paper and paints meant for the insects to draw some plants … well, surely Halder was unlikely to notice or care.

Two days later, I found something that Halder cared a great deal about, purely by accident.

I had been drawing blowfly maggots, which was exactly as thrilling as it sounds. They were mildly disgusting, but mostly they were dull. I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to give them names and do voices for them.

When I found that I was missing a maggot specimen, I consulted my predecessor’s notes, then stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, thinking, Somehow my life has led me to this point. Then I pushed back from the table and went to ask Halder for direction.

“Eh?” His eyes sharpened on me. “What did you say?”

“The first instar of Calliphora vicina,” I repeated patiently. “Either it’s mislabeled or it’s identical to C. vomitoria, but since the notes say that they’re two different—”

Halder’s fist slammed down on the desk. “How do you know what my notes say?!” he bellowed. Mottled red suffused his face, and for a moment I was afraid he was having an apoplectic fit.

I lurched back in my chair, astonished. “I … but…”

It’s just a maggot! I wanted to yell. Why are you this upset over one maggot? But of course the answer was that he was a naturalist and careers can be made or lost on the back of a single maggot, so I bit my tongue.

Hard.

“Are you spying on me, girl?” He pushed himself to his feet, leaning over the desk. “Did someone set you on me? The Megatherium Club?!”

Drops of spittle struck my face.

“You gave me the sketches!” I said. It came out as a squeak. I didn’t fear him physically—much—but his rage was shocking to see. “It was in the sketches, next to the drawings … you told me to use them…”

Halder stared at me. “The sketches,” he repeated. I nodded vigorously, wondering if I should get him a glass of water or flee the room.

He dropped back into his chair, the flush slowly fading from his cheeks.

After a moment, he said, “Vicina is identical to vomitoria until it pupates.

All the Calliphora blowflies are like that.”

“Okay.” I was torn between anger at him and an intense sympathetic embarrassment for him. Had he forgotten that he’d given me the sketches?

Why would he be so upset at the thought of me seeing his notes anyway? I remembered how he had pulled the few sketches he had given me from a

locked safe. Odd, even for a naturalist. You only did that if there was something you didn’t want people to see. “I’ll arrange the plate to show that. I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed something important.”

He nodded curtly, pressing a hand to his chest. Dear god, maybe he was having a fit. Should I do something? But what? All I could think of was to get Mrs. Kent, but what was she going to do? For that matter, what was I going to do? Was he going to remember that he’d been angry at me for no reason, or just that he’d been angry?

Maybe I could distract him? I scrambled for a topic to divert his ire.

“Errr … what is the Megatherium Club, sir?”

Halder flushed again, but his gaze was turned elsewhere. “Damned fools.

A drinking club disguised as a naturalists’ society. People advancing not because of their wits, but because they’d raised a glass with the right people forty years ago. Pah!” He looked at if he wanted to spit.

“There is no excuse for such nepotism,” I offered, even though it sounded to me like Halder mostly resented the fact that he hadn’t been invited.

“Entirely correct, Miss Wilson.” He shoved his spectacles up his nose.

“Nevertheless, I shall be vindicated. I have learned things about parasites that will revolutionize the field, and someday, the world shall wonder at it.”

I bowed my head in acknowledgment. Halder waved an irritable hand and I slipped away, feeling as if I’d run a mile in uncomfortable shoes. I had, of necessity, gotten used to being yelled at in the last few years.

Headmistress Silverton had a tongue like a greenbrier whip. But in her defense, it was usually for actual reasons, even if they were extremely minor. She had never accused me of spying on her.

Then again, naturalists are far more paranoid, as a group, about their work being stolen than headmistresses are. It is not as if one can copy a dozen schoolgirls and beat the originals to publication.

I shook my head and went back to painting maggots, telling myself that there was nothing unusual about Halder’s paranoia, and almost, almost succeeding.

I stayed up later than usual that night. Even after I blew out the candle, I sat in the dark studio, staring out the window, where the year’s first fireflies were beginning to call to each other in voices of flickering light.

Normally watching fireflies made me unaccountably happy, as if I were a small child again. Now I just felt weary and hopeless. Halder’s anger must have shaken me more than I expected. Why?

You got comfortable. He was pleased with your work and you started to think you were safe. But all it takes is an angry whim and you’ll be gone, out the door, onto the street.

The trees outside were Payne’s gray with hints of ultramarine where the moon touched them, the shadows almost black. Black pigment is usually a poor choice for painting shadows. It flattens them out, and shadows are rarely flat. They’re deep and layered and there are hints of shapes in them, things to catch your eye and make you wonder what’s there, and if maybe it’s looking back at you.

My cousin says he seen one … Sally’s story about blood thieves kept running through my mind. But it had been three years, Jackson said. And they’d caught the blood thieves and staked them through the heart and buried them out near Bynum. Miles away. The only thing outside worth worrying about was that possibly rabid raccoon, and it was almost certainly dead by now. By the time they wander around acting strange in daylight, they aren’t long for this world.

The shadows in the studio were thickening. I glanced over my shoulder, then looked resolutely away. The whitewashed walls were bright in the moonlight, but darkness had pooled along the floor, at the foot of the bookcases, and grew like a stain behind the wooden chest in the corner. My sense of intruding in a stranger’s room was stronger than ever.

It wasn’t my room, was it? It belonged to some other woman that Halder had employed. Had he driven her away with his temper? Had he fired her?

Was she destitute somewhere, or had she washed up at a girls’ school, teaching watercolors, not for love or skill but because watercolors were something that young ladies were supposed to learn, like music and deportment?

I realized that I was close to crying and bit my knuckle, angry at myself.

Don’t let the old bastard get to you. Mrs. Kent warned you what he was like.

Yes, and she’d warned me not to think he’d marry me either. The thought wrung a laugh from me. God! I’d sooner wed the Cuterebra.

I pinched the bridge of my nose until the feel of impending tears had been driven away. Don’t be ridiculous. Do you think good scientific illustrators fall out of trees? It took Halder a year to replace your predecessor. He won’t be in a hurry to replace you.

I didn’t know if that was true or not. What I did know was that Halder did not seem to like anything that upset the routine of his days. Mrs. Kent said he always ate the same breakfast at the same time.

The frogs were calling. I picked out chorus, bronze, and one tree frog calling, HNEEEEEEE! in a high, nasal whine that drew a reluctant smile from me. I propped my chin on my hand, staring into the dark.

One of the fireflies drew my eye. It somehow seemed to be blinking wrong.

Wait, is that a firefly? The frequency seems erratic.

It took me a moment to realize that I was seeing a light in the woods, and what I had mistaken for blinks was the shadow as it moved through the intervening trees.

I watched it, baffled. Mrs. Kent? But it was going in the opposite direction of the Kents’ house. I racked my brain for a possible destination.

Jackson had told me there was a stream back there, but I hadn’t ever visited it. And I already knew Sally didn’t go home.

The Devil walks these woods at night, Phelps had said. Did I believe that?

No, I didn’t believe it. The Devil, if He existed, lived in the hearts of men. And anyway, I doubt Satan needs to carry a light. There was the old story about Stingy Jack, who wandered between heaven and hell, carrying a lit coal in a turnip, but I had significant doubts that an immortal Irishman was loose in the Chatham woods. And I really didn’t believe in blood thieves, who were probably cougars anyway, and cougars definitely didn’t carry lights. Which meant that there was a real human out there on the property doing … something. But what?

I couldn’t think of many good reasons for someone to wander around the woods in the dark. Halder might go checking for nighttime insects, I supposed, but surely Halder was asleep by now. Searching for a lost animal? Could one of Mrs. Kent’s chickens have wandered off?

Well, it was none of my business, of course. I had no reason to go wandering through the woods at night.

An unexpected pang of relief went through me at that thought. I zeroed in on that feeling, isolating it and pinning it to a card like one of the beetles downstairs. Why am I relieved? I can’t actually be scared of the woods, can I?

I had spent half my life wandering through the Carolina woods. When I was seven years old, I caught a copperhead and brought it to show my father. The woods were mine, not like property but like family. I certainly wasn’t going to be put off from them by a religious zealot’s ranting about the Devil, or Jackson’s stories about blood thieves or cougars or whatever they were supposed to be. I was most definitely not scared.

The light paused for a moment, then moved on.

Possibly if I had already undressed, I would have decided that I didn’t have anything to prove. But I had only taken off one boot, and it was the work of a moment to shove my foot back in and hurry downstairs.

The back door was latched from the inside. Not Mrs. Kent, then. I dithered for a moment about continuing on, but curiosity has always been my besetting sin. I unlatched the door and slipped out.

A gibbous moon illuminated the landscape, which was good because I hadn’t grabbed a light of my own. For a moment I thought I’d lost the trail, but then I caught a bright flash between the trees, and scurried after.

The light bobbed along ahead of me. It was going very slowly, and I had no problem following it, even in the relative darkness. I set my feet cautiously, wary of ankle-breaking holes.

After a few minutes, it occurred to me that I was also trying not to make any noise.

It’s not that I’m scared of the woods. But you don’t know who has the light, and people are much scarier than trees.

Just as I thought that, I stepped on a sweet gum ball that rolled under my foot. (If you have never stepped on the spiky seedpod of Liquidambar styraciflua, you cannot know the depth of a Southerner’s loathing for them.) Damnation, I thought, barely catching myself before I fell. And then, belatedly, Oops.

The light stopped. A familiar voice called out, “Who’s there?”

Halder?

Why is Halder out here in the woods?

Is he researching some kind of nocturnal insect? That seemed most likely. Regardless, I didn’t particularly want to encounter the grumpy old bastard. He’d probably accuse me of spying on him again.

Which, in fairness, you kind of are doing … I stepped behind a tree and waited. After a moment, Halder grunted and turned away, walking deeper into the woods.

Lucky escape. Well, you know what the light is now. Time to go back to the house and go to bed. … And yet you seem to be following Halder.

I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. It was definitely unwise. If he caught me, I had no idea how I’d talk my way out of it. And it was certainly no business of mine if he wanted to wander around his own property with a lamp after dark, collecting specimens for the killing bottle.

Nevertheless, I padded after him, setting my feet as carefully as I could.

The ground was mostly pine needles and even last year’s leaves were very damp from our days of rain, so there were no betraying crunches. Halder didn’t turn around again. As we got closer to the stream, the frogs and katydids were calling so loudly that he probably couldn’t have heard me if I shouted. (and if something grabs you and hauls you into a tree and begins draining your blood, no one will ever know what happened to you.) I scowled in the dark, annoyed with myself. Don’t be ridiculous. The blood thief was a cougar, that was all. Probably the last one in the county.

Jackson was just scaring the new girl with ghost stories. The only thing in the woods that I was scared of was Halder, and only in case he spotted me.

So why was I following him?

Because he’s not catching insects.

The thought arrived with absolute certainty. I picked at it, wondering why I was so sure of that. Intuition, my father used to say, is just an observation that you don’t realize you’ve made. What had I observed?

Halder stopped at last. I stepped behind another tree and watched as he shifted the lamp from one hand to the other, then set it down. He could do that easily because … he wasn’t carrying a net.

That was the observation I hadn’t realized I’d made. No net. No gear of the sort a naturalist would carry. Just a lantern.

As my eyes adjusted, I realized Halder was standing in front of a little low building, not much larger than a well house. I heard him mutter as he fumbled with the lock, then he picked the light up again and pushed the door open. It closed behind him a moment later with an oddly metallic clang. No light leaked under the door.

I was left alone with the frogs and the katydids and the dark.

After about five minutes, I was bored. Whatever curiosity had moved me was wearing thin. There was nothing to be learned here, and whatever Halder was doing inside the small building, it was his own affair. For all I know, that’s where he keeps his collection of pornographic etchings.

I turned back. I was only a few yards into the trees when I heard the door clang behind me. Shadows rose around me as the light swayed back and forth.

A thicket of saltbush proved just tall enough to conceal me. I waited until Halder had passed and followed at a distance. He was moving more quickly now, muttering to himself. I caught “… serves him right…” and “… this long…” and then, with startling clarity, “Keep me out of the Megatherium Club, will they?” but most of the words were lost, if they were even words in the first place.

When we reached the clearing around the house, I stopped at the edge of the woods and waited. If Halder locked the kitchen door, I was going to be in a tough spot … but no. I suspect it never even occurred to him not to use the front door. He went around the front of the house, pausing only once to glance behind him. I waited in the shadow of the trees until I heard the front door close, and then gave it a few more minutes.

At last, when I judged it was safe—or at least when I was thoroughly sick of waiting and every mosquito in the county had arrived to feast—I slipped across the grass and into the kitchen. The house was dark and quiet.

I made my way to my room, feeling a stab of panic whenever a board creaked underfoot.

But no one popped out of a closet to shout “Aha!” or point an accusing finger at me. I slipped off my shoes, washed my face and hands, and went to bed, still wondering what, if anything, Halder had been doing out there in the dark.

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