Wolf Worm — Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

Two nights later, I put on my shoes, slipped out of the house, and waited.

And a pretty fool I’ll look if Halder doesn’t come out tonight, I thought, leaning against a tree trunk. The moon was waning and the blue light it cast over the grounds was barely enough to see by. I needed some time for my eyes to adjust, since I didn’t dare carry a lantern.

I looked up at the stars, trying to pick out constellations. Astronomy is the natural science that I know the least about. I could find Orion and the Big and Little Dippers, but that was as far as I went. My time in the woods was more usually spent turning over rocks than gazing up at the sky.

Probably for the best, given how hard it is to paint a good night sky in watercolor. There’s something about the glow of stars that simply doesn’t want to translate into paint. You can take the most spectacular night sky ever seen and on paper, it just turns into a sheet of muddy blue-black flecked with little white dots.

I heard a distant door slam and ducked hastily behind the tree I’d picked out. Light splashed around me, casting brief, fantastic shadows before moving on, then footsteps went past. I waited long enough for the sound to fade, then scurried after.

Definitely Halder. I could make out the familiar slumped form silhouetted against the lantern. He was moving quickly but kept throwing glances over his shoulder. He didn’t slow down or swing the lantern around though, which made it seem more like a nervous tic than an actual attempt to spot pursuit. Still, I moved from tree to shrub to tree, trying to stay in cover in case he decided to actually stop and look. Fortunately, sound couldn’t betray me, because the frogs were making a deafening racket,

intermixed with the shrilling of katydids and the short, sharp chirps of some insect that I didn’t know but that Halder probably did.

We reached the clearing that contained the Kents’ small, neat house, and Halder hastily dimmed the light down to a firefly glow. He moved cautiously around the side to the chicken coop, holding the lantern so that it didn’t shine into the darkened windows. I halted behind a loblolly pine and waited.

A whippoorwill called monotonously in the woods. Halder fumbled with the latch on the coop.

Something moved on the porch. I froze. So did Halder.

Claws scraped the boards as the old hound stood up, stretched, and came ambling down the steps.

Don’t look in my direction, I prayed. I’m not here. I’m not.

He took a few steps toward my tree. I saw a flash of moonlight on white teeth as he yawned. Surely he must be able to smell me. If he came up to me, I had no idea what to do. Hold very, very still and hope that Halder didn’t come to see what had attracted his attention? Try to run?

Oh please, please, go away, I can’t pet you right now … Then Halder got the door open and the old hound turned, attracted by either the sound or the movement of the light. His tail wagged amiably as he went toward the chicken coop.

Light gleamed through chinks in the boards, and a moment later, my employer emerged, holding a groggy chicken tucked firmly under his arm.

The dog came up and sniffed at the dangling feet with great interest.

Halder reached into his pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it to the hound. Suddenly all business, the dog caught it neatly in midair and trotted back to the porch. I heard the creak as he flopped down and began chewing.

Very clever. Cleverer than I had been, certainly. I’d known the dog was there, but I hadn’t even considered that he might give me away.

The light bobbed through the trees as Halder went back the way he had come. I gave chase, hearing the occasional puzzled err-err-errrk? from the hen. I felt a pang of sympathy for the poor chicken. I didn’t know what Halder’s plans were, but I suspected the bird’s future was extremely limited.

The gunpowder shed loomed ahead. I slipped back behind the shrubs and waited. Halder set down the lantern, took out his key, and unlocked it, then picked up the lantern again and stepped inside.

He didn’t shut the door behind him. He shouldered through some kind of drape and let it fall, cutting off both the light and a last, worried cluck from the chicken.

I swallowed hard. Did I dare get closer?

No! Stay here where it’s—well, not safe, obviously, this is all a terrible idea, but if you go any closer you are absolutely going to get caught, you know you’re going to get caught— The problem with anxiety is that you get so good at tamping down that inner voice that sometimes you ignore it even when it’s right. Halder had only spent about five minutes in the shed last time. I should definitely stay where I was.

Stop, stop, what are you doing, stop! I told myself as I slunk across the open ground. The moonlight was just barely strong enough to make out folds of material in the doorway. I touched it cautiously. Heavy oilcloth.

Very heavy. Weighted at the bottom too, it felt like, and stiffened along the edges, forming a barrier just inside the arc of the door.

Okay, now you know what the drape is made of, for all the good it does, now you’re going to turn around and go back to your hiding place … It occurred to me that there was no light coming from around the edges of the drape. I leaned closer. It was certainly heavy, but it couldn’t possibly seal so tightly that light couldn’t get out, could it? I didn’t hear anything from inside. The shed was so small, surely I should hear Halder moving, shouldn’t I?

He wouldn’t just be standing there in the dark, in total silence, holding a

chicken. That made no sense.

None of this makes any sense!

Crouching down, I plucked the edge of the drape and lifted it a tiny fraction. Light failed to spill out from underneath.

My courage would likely have failed me at that point, except that I heard Halder’s voice, much farther away than expected, saying, “Worked a treat though, didn’t it?”

It didn’t sound like he was in the tiny shed. It sounded like he was across a room and at the bottom of a flight of stairs. And who was he talking to?

Fear warred with curiosity and lost. I lifted the corner even higher and peered inside.

At last, I could see light. It was at the bottom of a flight of stairs that opened up in front of me. I saw the glow illuminating the edges of plain board steps, and what looked like an earth floor beyond.

Halder’s voice drifted up the steps. “No. I don’t.”

I strained my ears, but couldn’t hear any reply, not even a murmur.

A large insect climbed over my hand where it held back the drape and I jerked away, biting down a yelp. It was too dark to make out what species it might be. I shook my hand violently and it flew away into the dark. Moth, probably, or a large beetle. I lifted the drape again.

Below the shed, Halder laughed abruptly. It wasn’t a nice laugh. As it died away, so did the calls of the frogs and the insects, leaving a dreadful, vulnerable silence.

I should probably have fled then, but my brain was churning with questions. What was Halder doing? Who was he talking to? What was

going on underneath that shed?

Could there be a person down there?

I waited too long. The light swung suddenly, and I actually saw the top of his head come into view at the foot of the stairs before I jerked back, letting the drape fall. I scrabbled backward, heart hammering, tried to rise— and felt my feet go out from under me.

Stairs creaked as Halder climbed. Panic painted the inside of my skull a numb white. I crab-walked backward, hit something that I recognized as a fallen log, and flung myself over it, dropping flat. There was a gap underneath where the log lay across another one. If Halder happened to glance down, six feet to his right, he would almost certainly see me, but I had no more time to run.

The drape opened and he stepped out. I could only see him from the knees down. I wouldn’t even know if he’d seen me until he shouted.

Assuming he bothered to shout.

A katydid called, then another one, and suddenly the full night chorus was rising again. Oh good, I managed to think. Now I won’t even hear him coming.

His feet turned back toward the shed, and he set the lantern down. I heard him fumbling with the drape, then the door swung shut, but the woods were too loud to hear the key click in the lock.

Don’t look over here, I begged silently. Don’t look. My dress was dark, true, but the forest floor was the color of old pine needles and the fabric would stand out like an ink stain against it, with my hands and face horribly bright by comparison. My only hope was that he wouldn’t bother looking this way at all.

The songs of the frogs swelled louder as Halder bent down and picked up the lantern. I squeezed my eyes shut to stop any betraying reflection.

Please be blind from looking at the light. Please have no night vision.

Please go away.

A new sound threaded through the cacophony, thin but oddly tuneful. It took me a moment to realize that Halder was whistling.

Darkness touched the backs of my eyelids. I opened one a crack and saw the door of the gunpowder shed, closed and locked, bathed only in starlight.

When I finally dared to lift my head, long after the whistling had faded away, I saw Halder’s lantern far off through the trees, heading back to the house.

Well, I thought as the light bobbed away from me. Now what do I do?

Obviously I couldn’t tell Halder I’d seen him, and I wasn’t sure how to tell Mrs. Kent what had been happening to her chickens. Your employer is taking them at night without telling you and putting them in a shed that’s supposed to be full of gunpowder. How did I even start that conversation?

How could I explain that I’d been following Halder around at night? Why should she even believe me? How could I prove it, short of dragging her out to watch with me?

Sally was far too young. I could tell Jackson, but he’d naturally tell his wife. I could have sworn him to secrecy, I supposed, but going around swearing other woman’s husbands to secrecy and asking them to come lurk in the shrubbery with me at night … No, that was not a road I wanted to start down.

I would have given a great deal for someone else to confide in. My friend Esther from the school hadn’t really understood my devotion to science, but she certainly understood secrecy. We’d covered for each other

regularly—me when she had slipped out to visit the synagogue, and her when I snuck out to mail letters to potential employers. Esther would have understood how bizarre the situation was, and she certainly would never have told Halder. But Esther was two hundred miles away in Wilmington and I couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to.

Why on earth was Dr. Halder delivering hens to a small shed in the middle of the night? More importantly, who had he been talking to?

My mind seethed with possibilities, most of them bad. Maybe he was having a secret meeting with someone. The Klu Klux Klan had been active here for years, even if they were supposed to be as dead as the cougar now.

I could just about believe Phelps was a Klan member, since plenty of the miserable bastards claimed to be religious, and that he and Halder were having a meeting, except that a meeting would take a lot more than five minutes and why would they need a live chicken?

It was possible that he could have been talking to himself. Plenty of people did. I did it myself, sometimes. He’d sounded like he was answering someone else, but it had been late and I had been very nervous. I might have misheard. “Worked a treat” was the sort of thing that you might say when you saw an experiment going well.

An experiment could explain what he was doing. He studied necrophagic insects, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he was laying out a dead chicken to see how long it took maggots to devour it, or even just to collect the insects themselves for his collection.

But why the secrecy? Everyone in the house knew about his work. He could just have ordered Jackson to kill a hen for him and done it in broad daylight. And why put it inside a shed, where it would be harder for the bugs to get at the body?

I rubbed my forehead. A comparison, maybe? Rate of decomposition in a closed space versus outside with more insects? But again, why the secrecy?

I could easily believe that Halder would decide that he had to test a theory right this minute. Lord knows, Father would occasionally get an idea in the middle of the night, leap out of bed, and start rummaging through herbarium specimens. Halder was likely no different. And certainly having done so, it might not occur to Halder to tell Mrs. Kent, and leave her baffled as to where her chickens had gone.

But to keep going back at night? And taking even more chickens? Was he feeding something? A colony of dermestid beetles … no, that made no sense, you could feed them just as easily in daylight. Was Halder working with a nocturnal species that fed on carrion?

A large insect had climbed over my hand. It could have been a beetle. Or a moth. Were there any carrion-eating moths? It wouldn’t surprise me, actually; you see butterflies on carrion regularly, licking at salt. If there were necrophagic moths, Halder would be the person keeping them, Lord knows.

I could almost believe that Halder was keeping an insect colony down there, except for the way he kept looking over his shoulder when he went to the shed. He had moved like a man doing something illicit.

What possible illicit acts could you get up to in a shed, with a live chicken? I wondered, and then gave the equivalent of a full-brain cough and had to compose myself for a moment.

Well. All right. Leaving aside certain … err … exotic depravities, that is.

I had a hard time picturing specifics, but I will admit that I didn’t try very hard. You cannot grow up among biologists without a certain degree of open-mindedness, but there are hard limits.

Although in fairness, exotic depravities might explain both his reluctance to tell anyone and Phelps warning me away from the shed. But that assumed that Phelps knew what Halder did in the shed. Maybe Phelps had helped him dig the stairs out below?

I saw the Devil in the woods, Miss Wilson … and he was buggering a chicken.

I started giggling so hysterically that I had to shove my hand into my mouth to keep from alerting the house. What the fireflies thought of the shadowy figure making “huh … ahuh … ahaha…” noises, I suppose no one will ever know.

I slipped back into the house and went up to my room. Unanswered questions make an uncomfortable pillow, but at least I’d managed to prove that Halder was doing something strange, even if I had no idea what. I just wished that I didn’t have such a bad feeling about it.

I wished even more strongly that I could tell someone the next morning.

Mrs. Kent had not taken well to the loss of another hen. She embarked on a savage spree of baking that left Sally and I tiptoeing through a house full of glorious smells and barely contained wrath. I bolted my breakfast—bacon and toast, not eggs—feeling horribly guilty. Even if I hadn’t been the one stealing chickens, I knew what the problem was. I just couldn’t figure out how to tell anyone what I knew.

I snuck down for coffee a little before ten and saw the tray that Mrs.

Kent prepared for Halder. The usual poached egg was missing. I wondered if Halder would care. His housekeeper certainly did. Her jaw was so tightly clenched that I was afraid her teeth would splinter.

I lurked in the library, the door open, and eavesdropped shamelessly down the hall.

I couldn’t quite make out what Halder said, but caught the end of Mrs.

Kent’s reply. “… Jackson into town to buy some.”

Halder said something else.

“No, sir,” said Mrs. Kent coldly. She sounded angry. Had Halder confessed? I wished I could hear what he was saying. I leaned out of the library doorway, straining my ears.

“… going to stay up with a shotgun tonight. I’m about done with this.”

I gulped. He definitely hadn’t confessed. I inched farther down the hall until I could make out the doctor’s voice.

“Yes … err … quite right,” Halder was saying. He sounded as uncomfortable as I felt. “I’d rather not have anyone shot on the premises, however.”

“Oh, he’ll load it with rock salt,” said Mrs. Kent. “I ain’t looking to murder anybody. Just warning you in case you hear a gunshot.”

“Yes, yes, quite right. Thank you, Mrs. Kent.”

I lunged farther back into the library just in time to avoid being spotted.

My heart pounded and I pressed my hand against my chest. I knew that there are people who enjoy eavesdropping and get a thrill from going through other people’s medicine cabinets, but clearly I was not one of them.

I am really not cut out for all this sneaking around. I don’t enjoy it at all.

Actually, I feel sick.

Judging by Halder’s responses, he wasn’t cut out for sneaking around either. He hadn’t sounded at all like his usual abrasive self. He’d sounded

worried. Guilty, even.

But they’re his chickens. He doesn’t need to steal them. And scientists hardly ever feel ashamed about their work—quite the opposite. You can’t stop them talking about it. And it’s not like he’d feel guilty for sacrificing a mere chicken in the name of science. That one colleague of Father’s electrocuted a horse, for god’s sake, trying to prove something or other about alternating current. So far as I knew, the only branch of science that didn’t eventually wind up experimenting on living things was geology. A chicken was nothing.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe he was committing some kind of unnatural sex acts with the chickens.

No, no. He wouldn’t have had time. Granted I had only a hazy concept of how that would even work, but it would certainly have taken more than two minutes, wouldn’t it? There’d be cleanup. Anyway it only started in the last week. The first time you followed him to the shed, he wasn’t carrying livestock of any sort, and based on Mrs. Kent’s reaction, this is a new turn of events.

But if we’ve ruled out sex and science, what else is there? I had lived a fairly sheltered existence in some regards, but as far as basic human motivations went, I could only think of a few. Sex. Science. Money. Power.

I stared down at the tray of pinned insects in front of me without really seeing them. Halder had money, and I had serious doubts that he could increase his fortune by depositing a single chicken in a shed nightly. Same went for power. It just made no sense.

Sighing, I pulled out my sketchbook and set to work on the next round of illustrations. It was clear that I wasn’t going to solve this mystery any time soon, and at least I could work on earning my daily bread. Today was another Cuterebra. Halder had three trays of the damn things, one made entirely of C. emasculator specimens. This discovery had annoyed the hell out of me, given how long I’d struggled with the killing jar and the botfly buzzing against the glass, refusing to die.

No, money and power made no sense as motives for Halder. If he had more money, he’d spend it on dead insects, and he used the power he did have to annoy his assistant.

It was only later that I realized that I’d left off a very important motive, but by then, it was too late to do anything about it.

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