Wolf Worm — Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

“It’s got to be a tramp,” Mrs. Kent said at dinner, addressing the air over the stove. The rest of us were crouched like rabbits hoping to avoid the hawk’s notice. The pot pie she had made was spectacular, with a crust that melted like butter. I wished that I was able to enjoy it. “No critter ever opened a lock like that.”

I cleared my throat nervously. “Raccoons can be very—”

“No way one could’ve lifted that bar. And I know I didn’t leave it unlocked.”

None of us were foolish enough to challenge this.

“No feathers either,” Mrs. Kent continued. “Just gone, same as last time.”

“Maybe it was blood thiefs got it,” Sally piped up.

Jackson winced. Mrs. Kent wheeled around, holding a wooden spoon like a sword. “Don’t you talk nonsense, girl! That old business is done and over and no need to bring it back up!”

Sally fled. Jackson silently produced his flask and poured us both out a measure. Mrs. Kent went back to staring at the air over the stove.

“I’ll go to town and buy you a padlock,” Jackson offered again.

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to, when you’ve got to padlock the henhouse.” Mrs. Kent finally abandoned her post at the stove and sank down at the table. She glared at the ceiling, possibly addressing God. “Dog didn’t even bark.”

“Dog’s getting old,” said Jackson reasonably. “I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s got any pups going begging.”

My desire to defend the poor hound’s honor was intense, but I bit my tongue hard.

Mrs. Kent put her forehead against her fist. “That dog’s only seven years old, and I’m not raising another pup until I have to. If a tramp steals a chicken, fine, but you get a chicken-killing dog in there…”

Jackson, very wisely, poured her a small quantity of whiskey and slid it across the table. She sighed and her shoulders sagged. “Hatched every one of them out my own self,” she said gloomily. I could have painted a portrait entirely in shades of Payne’s gray and ultramarine, and called it Discouraged Woman. “Good layers, the lot. I don’t begrudge anybody a meal if they’re hungry, but if they were gonna steal chickens, couldn’t they have grabbed one of the young roosters?”

I excused myself quietly. I could just about hold up to an angry Mrs.

Kent, but a depressed Mrs. Kent was too much. Guilt gnawed at my guts like one of Halder’s screwworms. I wanted to tell her, but how?

All this angst over missing chickens, I thought, staring out the window.

Though it wasn’t really about the chickens, was it? Mrs. Kent would have been annoyed if a fox had killed them, but not upset like this. It was clearly the notion of a person taking them that was upsetting her view of things. I could understand that. Either your neighbors were thieves, or there were strangers lurking in the woods who might not stop at chickens, and neither prospect was particularly appealing, was it?

I didn’t go out that night. Neither did Halder, judging by the lack of a light. Presumably neither of us wanted to take a couple of barrels of rock salt … although Halder didn’t have to, dammit, he owned the chickens, he could have just said … You’ve been over this a dozen times already. You’re not going to figure it out with the information you have available.

Clearly what was needed was more information.

I went out early in the morning, carrying my sketchbook. If Phelps was lurking around the shed—And why would he be lurking, what does he know, how can I find out?—I would just tell him that I was sketching the building.

Drawing architecture is excellent practice for any illustrator, which is probably why I hate doing it. Yes, you have to be precise with botanical illustration, but I’ve yet to meet an orchid with crown moldings and a dozen windows that need to be placed in correct perspective.

Still, I’d draw the damn shed if that’s what it took.

The air was cool and humid, but I knew the temperature wouldn’t last, even if the humidity did. Cicadas were already beginning their ascending buzz, summoning the heat. I threaded my way between head-high buckeyes, their flowers mostly spent and littering the ground beneath them with damp red trumpets.

No one awaited me as I approached the shed. I looked around, half expecting Phelps to jump out at me, but the woods were empty. I glanced over at the log that I’d hidden behind and felt a shudder that started at the hinge of my jaw and went down past my rib cage. That wasn’t a hiding place in any sense of the word. I had gotten absurdly lucky. Halder must have been distracted, or his night vision had been ruined by lantern light, or perhaps, as the headmistress used to say, God sometimes looks out for fools.

The door was just as heavy as I remembered it, with the odd metal plates around the edges, and the cracks in the wood were still sealed up tight. Of course, if you were running an experiment with insects, you wouldn’t want any to get in from outside, would you? The wrong kind of wasp could be just as dangerous as a fox in a henhouse.

I stifled a sigh. I was probably going to be embarking on wasps next.

Halder had mentioned that I should keep an eye out for caterpillars with parasitic wasp larvae on them when I was out on the grounds. Those would be almost impossible to preserve on a pin, no matter how many patented caterpillar inflaters you owned.

The lock on the door was still very large and very solid.

I stared at it for a long moment, feeling as if there was something important here that I was missing. Shed. Door. Hasp. Padlock.

The lock is on the outside.

I grimaced. Of course it’s on the outside, you nitwit, how else would Halder unlock it?

No, wait. If it had been a knob, not a padlock, he could have unlocked it from either side. He could lock it behind him when he went down. But he didn’t. Why not?

Memory flared of a stormy night, and the girls telling ghost stories, scaring themselves into panicky giggling. The speaker with the candle held low in front of her, painting yellow-orange light on her chin and leaving her eyes dark, like empty sockets. “And the little girl laid down in the trunk to

hide … and no matter how hard everyone looked, they couldn’t find her.

Hours went by, then days, then weeks … Everyone was frantic. It was like she vanished. They thought she must have been kidnapped and murdered … her mother died of a broken heart … then one day, when they were cleaning the attic, they opened the trunk, and there she was! When she closed the lid, the latch fell down and she was locked in. Nobody heard her screaming and she died all alone in the dark and her ghost haunted the attic for years afterwards, pounding on the walls, whispering ‘Let me out…’”

Gasps and more terrified giggles greeted this, and then the practical girl had said, practically, “Come on, they’d have smelled her when she started to rot.”

Cries of “Ewww! Disgusting!” greeted this statement. The storyteller lowered her candle, annoyed. “They did not. It was cool in the attic and the lid kept the smell in.”

“Nothing keeps a smell like that in,” said the practical girl. In the doorway, I had stifled a sigh. It was impossible to explain to her that some people didn’t want accuracy, they wanted a delicious frisson of terror. I knew I couldn’t explain it, because I’d been like her myself. Instead I went in and shooed everyone to bed in case the headmistress came by to check for lights under the doors. Fear of the headmistress, at least, was far more real and solid than ghost stories.

Ghosts aside, the moral was clear about not closing doors that would lock behind you. The gunpowder shed was not nearly so small and cramped as a trunk in the attic, but it would still be a dangerous place to be trapped.

It would be impossible to force the door with those metal plates. You could yell for days and, unless somebody happened to come along at precisely the right moment, nobody would hear you.

But I’d heard Halder talking to someone in the shed. And then he closed the door and locked it, with a lock that couldn’t be opened from inside.

The second shudder went all the way down my spine, and I felt myself break out in gooseflesh despite the increasing warmth.

My god. What if he really does have a prisoner down there?

I took a step back from the door, holding my sketchbook up in front of me as if it were a talisman to ward off evil.

Could he … had he … could there be someone down there, right now, in the dark?

Stop that. I shook my head, summoning the spirit of that practical girl.

You thought it sounded like he was talking to himself, remember? And if there was a person being held down there, you certainly wouldn’t throw live chickens to them every few nights. That’s not how you feed a human.

Besides, who would Halder want to keep prisoner? My employer flew into rages, certainly, but unless Fitch the entomologist had come to visit, I couldn’t think of anyone. Granted, that wasn’t proof. I had learned next to nothing about my employer, and certainly he could have murderous passions I didn’t know anything about, but … Maybe it’s the previous illustrator, my treacherous imagination whispered.

Oh, come on. He isn’t Bluebeard. And the studio’s been empty for a year, Mrs. Kent said as much. Do you expect me to believe that he’s kept my predecessor alive in a shed for a year by throwing them occasional live chickens?

When I put it to myself in those terms, it did seem a bit ridiculous.

It’s just a damn padlock. People put them on things they don’t want other people getting into. It doesn’t mean there’s anyone locked inside. You’re piling up assumptions and you still don’t have any more information than you did yesterday.

I walked around the back of the shed, where the roof dipped down so sharply. Yes, all right, the shape made sense now when I thought about a staircase going down. And when I looked in the direction of the stream, the woods did slope down in that direction, so maybe this section was high enough to hollow a space out above the water table. Given the red clay everywhere, I’d expect the room to be awfully damp and prone to flooding, but I was no architect.

Let’s see … it looked like the stairs went down maybe six feet, so then the room should be straight down from about … here.

I stood at a spot just behind the back wall of the shed and studied the

ground.

Yep, that was ground all right.

It didn’t look like anything much. Pine needles, last year’s leaves, a small rock with an even smaller tuft of moss. There was a rather sad Polystichum acrostichoides fern, which didn’t look sturdy enough to hold up the weight of the Latin name. In a painting, I would have rendered the

whole thing with a wash of yellow ochre, maybe with a hint of Tuscan red mixed in, and not bothered with details.

I stomped my foot, wondering if the earth would sound hollow, like a wall with an opening behind it. It sounded exactly like I would expect ordinary dirt to sound.

I moved over a dozen yards and stomped again experimentally. It also sounded like dirt. I went back to the original spot and stomped a few more times. Was it just slightly louder? Was there a tiny bit more resonance? I couldn’t tell.

I lifted my foot to try again and a sound burst out of the ground that nearly stopped my heart in my chest.

It was a dry, rasping scream, the sound of a fiddle bow drawn inexpertly across the strings, and yet there was some quality to it that undoubtedly came from an animal throat. I leapt back, horrified, feeling as if I’d accidentally stepped on a cat’s tail and heard it yowl—but of course there was nothing there, nothing but the ground and the dead leaves.

I looked around wildly for a source, feeling as if the familiar woods had suddenly turned alien and strange. I knew these trees and I knew what lived in them. I knew the cries of whippoorwills and owls, the shrieks of katydids and frogs, but I did not know this.

Another scream rose from the ground, practically under my feet, a sound

of misery infinitely prolonged.

My nerve broke and I ran.

Fortunately, no one saw me bolt out of the woods and into the house. If Mrs. Kent had seen me tear past, I would have had to explain … what exactly? I heard a noise in the woods and it scared me?

I needed tea desperately. My hands shook a little as I filled the kettle.

Logically. Think logically. You are a naturalist, not a spiritualist to jump at knocking shadows. What does logic tell us?

Logic was having a hard time telling me anything through the screaming of my nerves. I gritted my teeth. What would your father think?

My father had been a brilliant naturalist. He had taught me to look and see what was there, not what I expected to see. If there was some terrifying creature underground, he would have been … well, not the first to seek it out, since botany was his first love, but he certainly would not have shied away from it.

I took a deep, steadying breath and let it out again, trying to organize my thoughts.

Right. Logic. I can do this. I had heard a creature that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before. What did that mean?

The most logical explanation was that I was wrong, of course. If you hear a horrible sound in the woods and you don’t know what it is, it’s probably a fox. (Another of my father’s pearls of wisdom.) So, yes.

Probably I had simply startled, and been startled by, a fox.

And if it wasn’t?

Well, it wasn’t impossible that there was some creature down there unknown to science. Even in the enlightened age of 1899, we had not described everything that walked, crawled, swam, or flew beneath the sun.

It was little more than a decade ago that a French priest had sent back the skin of the strange black-and-white bear from China, a beast entirely new to Western science. Such creatures existed.

But really, what were the odds that Halder was keeping a completely unknown species hidden away in a shed?

At least you know it’s not human. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

Strangely, it was. The idea of a prisoner had been horrifying, and I would have had to do something about it. You can’t just let people be kept in a hollowed-out hole in the ground. But doing something about it would have undoubtedly meant the end of my employment, and … well … Fine. It’s petty and venal and you feel bad about it, but it’s still a relief that doing the right thing doesn’t mean getting fired.

I would have done the right thing though. I would have. … I’m almost sure I would have.

The nasty little anxious voice in my head whispered that I was almost certainly a terrible person who would choose the security of a job over the suffering of another human being. I shoved it back down. I would not.

Father would have disowned me. He had been an abolitionist, descended

from Quakers, and even if his faith in the divine had been overshadowed by his faith in plants, those particular beliefs remained strong.

I would have stood up for what was right. It’s just that sometimes, it’s a relief not to have to.

A shriek went up behind me and I nearly bolted out of the room. (it’s here it’s here it’s found you) Then I recognized the sound of the kettle and laughed at myself. It came out as more of a croak, admittedly, but it still came out. I set the tea to steep, feeling foolish. If I was so nervous that a teakettle could practically send me into hysterics, I was clearly not what one would call a reliable observer.

Right. So there’s an animal in the shed, and Halder was feeding it. That’s all it was.

I wouldn’t particularly want to be kept in a dark room under a shed, but Halder was a biologist. Perhaps it was a nocturnal species or a burrowing one, and preferred the dark. And as for the secrecy … You know that it’s got something to do with his parasite studies. You know it’s probably revolting. I thought of the jar of screwworm larvae and shuddered. Was he infecting some unfortunate host with live ones?

Possible. Unpleasant, yes, and I couldn’t have done it myself, but … well … thousands of animals suffered screwworm infestations every year. It was an immense and intractable problem. Anything Halder could learn that might someday lead to a solution … Regardless, I had my answer. I could stop chasing the doctor around the woods at night.

Thank the Lord for that. Just thinking about how close I had come to discovery made a shudder diffuse through my skin like ink in water.

When I dropped off the latest illustration the next day, I felt as if my guilt must be blazing like a brand across my face. Apparently it wasn’t though, or maybe Halder was feeling just as guilty, because he took my painting after no more than a cursory glance. I stepped out, feeling lightheaded, as if I’d gotten away with something.

A week went by, with no more missing chickens, and no more lights moving through the trees. Either the threat of being filled full of rock salt by his own hired man was sufficient to dissuade him completely, or Halder had moved on to some other avenue of … whatever it was he was doing. Mrs.

Kent returned to her normal self, and, after Jackson returned with a cage full of squawk and feathers, breakfast also returned to normal.

I was still deeply confused about the whole thing, but as the days passed, my concerns … well, “faded” was the wrong word. I dug them out and turned them over so often that they began to fray at the edges, becoming part of the background anxiety of my life. I had gotten so good at tamping down anxious thoughts that these were just more of the same.

Probably he was feeding some kind of carrion-eating insects in the shed, and was so paranoid about someone stealing his research that he had resorted to outlandish secrecy. Probably I’d misheard most of what he said, and he’d just been talking to himself after all.

Probably it had just been a fox after all. Certainly there were plenty of them around, feeding on the world-famous Chatham rabbit. And yes, it had seemed to come from underground, but I had been nervous and jumpy and the hardest lesson a naturalist has to learn is how desperately unreliable their own senses can be in the moment.

And even if neither of those things was true, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it anyway. I was hardly going to pick Halder’s pocket looking for the key. I didn’t know how to pick a lock, unlike the heroines in the Gothic books scattered around the studio, who all seemed to have childhoods that involved picking locks with hairpins. And I certainly wasn’t going to grab an axe from the woodshed and go try to hack the door down.

So I painted. I painted endless identical botflies, and when I had exhausted Halder’s collection of botflies, I painted the bone skipper fly, Thyreophora. Halder had a single specimen collected from Austria, before they went extinct. It was a strange little horror with a brilliant red-orange head, and while I hate to think of any species going extinct, I admit that I was much more broken up about the great auk than the bone skipper.

Most of my painting was done outside. Granted, it took a while after the Cuterebra incident for me to be quite comfortable on the balcony again. But indoors was just as muggy and uncomfortable, and at least there was a

slight breeze outside. After several days during which I encountered nothing more alarming than mosquitos and butterflies, I had relaxed.

Day followed day without much change. Sometimes it rained. This didn’t make things any less muggy. Jackson found a hornworm caterpillar with a line of white capsules clinging to its back, courtesy of a parasitic wasp of the Ichneumon family. He gravely presented it to me, like a knight offering a sword, and I accepted it equally gravely.

“Your caterpillar, Miss Wilson.”

“My gratitude, Mr. Kent.”

Then we both began snickering, and Mrs. Kent, who watched the whole exchange, rolled her eyes and told us that we were both ridiculous and that caterpillars did not belong in the kitchen.

I did not use the ether bottle for this specimen. There was hardly any point—the average speed of a hornworm caterpillar is only slightly faster than a rock, provided the rock is not feeling motivated. It lived in a large jar on the studio table for two days, and I only bothered with the jar because Smiley was extremely interested in what I was doing.

When I was finished, I released the caterpillar back into the garden.

There was no real reason to do so—it had been doomed from the moment that a wasp found it. The larvae would devour it from the inside, leaving it a limp little sack of green hide. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill it outright. I don’t know how much pain a hornworm caterpillar feels, but surely that cannot be a pleasant experience.

Still, who am I to sit in judgment on when a caterpillar’s life is worth living? Did the doomed relish the taste of a tomato stem any less thoroughly?

“Well done,” said Dr. Halder, when I presented him with the illustration.

“This has been drawn many times before, of course, but it is important to include it in my work as one of the classic examples of parasitism. Did you know that the wasp larvae will deliberately avoid the vital organs of the host as long as possible, in order to preserve its life, and thus, presumably, its freshness?”

I had not actually known that. I kept my face expressionless. “How do they know what organs are most vital to the caterpillar?”

“It is instinctual, of course. The wasps are hardly given an anatomical chart. They have simply evolved blindly over the course of millennia,

growing more and more attuned to their hosts.” He tapped his fingertips together. “We pity the caterpillars their suffering, but in truth, the wasps are trapped more than the caterpillars are. Their species is unable to survive without the specific host. Their fortunes are intertwined. Anything that wiped out the caterpillar would wipe out the wasp as well, but if the wasps were to go extinct, the caterpillar would neither notice nor care.”

My suspicion was that Halder did not pity either caterpillar or wasp, but it hardly seemed politic to say so.

“Charles Darwin believed that the existence of the Ichneumonidae was proof that a beneficent God had not designed all of creation,” Halder said musingly. “For surely He would not have deliberately created something that required such unspeakable suffering in order to survive.”

I made a noncommittal noise. I was actually rather inclined to side with Darwin on this one, but I had no more wish to debate theology with Halder than I had with Phelps. Besides, Halder had not hired me for my opinions.

Still, it was something of a relief, when I went back to the specimens, to work on something other than caterpillars.

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