Chapter 13
This time, I took no chances. No more following people through the dark and diving for cover.
I armed myself with a candle and matches, though I didn’t dare light them in the woods.
It seemed unlikely that anyone would see it, with the doctor gone and Phelps thankfully not staying at the house overnight.
Nevertheless, I did not want to get into the shed and find myself stumbling around blind.
Could it really be unlocked? Really? Was I finally about to learn what Halder was experimenting on?
Don’t get your hopes up. You might just have missed the click, that’s all.
But if you didn’t, then you’ll know soon.
Dusk spread ultramarine shadows under the trees, then deepened into dark. I paced the studio restlessly, unable to settle. Soon. Soon.
I thought I had successfully buried my curiosity, but apparently I had only shoved it down to fester into obsession. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I looked almost feverish. Two spots of color burned high on my cheeks, a rose madder wash on cold white skin.
Soon.
I waited until I heard Mrs. Kent leave, waited a little longer, then slipped out the door and into the woods.
The walk to the shed took far too long, and I forgot it all instantly the moment that I arrived.
It was a dark night and the shadows were thick around the shed.
At least, I thought it was dark? My vision seemed odd somehow, the edges bright with pinpricks of light, but it didn’t make it any easier to see.
Calm down. Your heart is pounding like you’ve been running.
I shook myself. Regardless of the darkness, it was easy to make out the heavy lock. I put out a hand, my heart in my throat, and tugged down.
It opened without a sound.
My god, my god, it’s open, it’s really open!
With nerveless fingers, I slid the lock from the hasp and hung it back on the door. I stepped over the threshold, swung the door shut behind me, and stood in darkness. When I reached out, the fabric of the drape caught my fingers.
Steady … steady …
I took the matches from my pocket. You’re going to feel awfully silly if you light that thing and the room really is full of gunpowder. Unless you drop the match and then you won’t feel anything for long.
Ah yes, that rare gunpowder that eats live chickens, I snapped back at myself, and lit the match, then the candle.
The space between the drape and the wall was only wide enough for the door to open. Behind the door was a peg with something hanging from it, something so oddly incongruous that I paused with my hand on the drape. It looked like a lady’s hat with a veil. Huh. That’s strange.
Unlike everything else about this situation, which is totally normal.
I pushed the drape aside. The stairs yawned below me.
Something flickered in their depths, and for an instant I thought there was someone else down there, until I realized I was looking at a reflection.
The early summer rains had left at least three inches of water on the floor of the hollowed-out room.
There, I told myself triumphantly. No one stores gunpowder in ankle-deep water. Fortunately, I was wearing my sturdy boots. I hitched my skirt up to keep the hem dry and descended the staircase.
The first thing that came into view was a wooden table. It held a chipped enamel pan and what looked like a pair of rusted forceps, but nothing else of interest.
My last step onto the floor splashed instead of squelched. Someone had laid boards down over the clay. It felt surprisingly solid underfoot. Burlap had been tacked up over the walls and boards covered the ceiling as well, braced and re-braced.
I had only a moment to take that in, however. My attention was immediately claimed by the second table in the back of the room.
The one with the corpse laid out atop it.
It was very obviously a corpse. No living human, even in the farthest extremes of starvation, could look like that. The ribs were etched so deeply that I could have fit my hand into the grooves between them. Skin and hair still clung to the body, otherwise I would have called it a skeleton.
Strangely, I was not frightened. I had seen skeletons before. Art students use them to study anatomy. I took a step forward, the water splashing around my feet, and lifted my candle higher.
It—he—looked desiccated, despite the thick humidity of the air.
I thought of mummies pulled from Egyptian tombs.
His skin had shrunk so tight against the bone that I could see the sunken depression between the bones of his forearms, leading down to the delicate bones of … the wrists, bound with iron manacles …
I swallowed hard.
My first attention had been for the corpse itself, not its surroundings. But now I looked and fear coiled up from my belly and took me by the throat.
The body lay spread-eagled on a wire mesh, heavy and widely spaced, like a fence panel, framed with wood. Iron shackles, dripping with rust, enclosed his wrists and ankles.
Oh god, I thought. Halder, what have you done?
If I had found that he was using human corpses in experiments with insects that ate carrion, I would have been horrified, yes. But the dead were dead and long past harming, and, God help me, I would have understood why he did it.
But the dead don’t need to be chained down.
I wanted to turn away. No, I wanted to run screaming. My vision swam.
Stop that. You are a naturalist, are you not?
This isn’t natural! I shouted inside my skull.
No. But you are a trained observer. So observe, damn you, and quit cringing.
My breathing steadied. I straightened my shoulders. The dead are dead. Now the living have to take notes.
The corpse had been male, in life, though what remained was shrunken almost to nonexistence, and his face was stained with black around the nose and mouth.
His hands had shrunken so far that he could have pulled loose from any ordinary shackle.
In life, the fetters must have been cruelly tight.
But his fingers … what was wrong with his fingers?
They looked impossibly long and deformed, curling back on themselves. So did his toes. I took another step forward, saw the sharp edges, and realized that I was looking at fingernails that had grown and grown and grown and never been trimmed.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How long was this poor soul here?
The wire platform was about waist high, but there was a solid wooden shelf a few feet under it. A wide metal trough covered half of it, perhaps to catch the prisoner’s waste. I saw flashes of white in the candlelight and leaned down.
Chicken feathers.
I had no time to dwell on what that might mean, because in bending down, I saw what lay on the underside of the wire mesh.
My first wild thought was that someone had poured wax over the body and that it had dripped downward, forming swollen droplets that hung from the underside of the corpse in pale swags.
Then I saw the dark ovals on each swelling, the blunt black ends of larvae burrowed beneath the surface, and I knew.
I did not scream. I did not even flinch. I simply stared.
The botfly larvae had grown atop one another in places, dozens of fat warbles hanging together like bunches of sickly grapes.
Under the corpse’s hips and lower back, they were so thickly clustered that they formed a mass as large as a man’s head.
All the flesh that was missing from the bones hung below the mesh, filled with squirming, parasitic life.
I might have stood there, frozen, until dawn, if not for the candle. Hot wax burned a trail down my hand and I yelped and dropped it.
The flame hit the water and went out.
Panic leapt up and grabbed me by the throat.
The blackness that engulfed me was a hundred times deeper and darker than anything aboveground.
I went to my knees in the water, groping across the surface for the candle, because if I couldn’t find it, I was going to be blundering through the dark, looking for the exit, and what if I didn’t find it, what if I got turned around and went toward the body instead, what if I reached out and my hand closed over the warbles, the soft flesh stretched tight around the dark body within, what if it moved …
Stop that! I screamed at myself. Stop that!
My petticoats were soaked with water. It sloshed over the top of my boots.
It was freezing cold, much colder than it had any right to be, but I kept sliding my hands across the surface, feeling desperately for the candle, terrified that I was making ripples that would send it floating even farther away.
And then my fingers touched something smooth and cylindrical and I felt it bobbing away and snatched it up. Found the wick. Nearly cried with relief.
I was groping in my pocket for matches when something buzzed against my face.
I batted it away with a shriek. It was big, the size of a bumblebee, and on some level I knew exactly what it was, but if I let that thought come up to the surface, I was going to pass out right here in the black water and then it would come and lay eggs in my skin and …
The match flared up. My hands shook so violently that I had to move two steps and brace myself against the wooden table before I could light the candle. Cold fabric clung to my legs and I realized that I was weeping.
I lifted the candle just as the corpse opened its eyes.
When the hurricane’s eye had passed over the school, the howling winds dropped away and we sat in sudden, impossible silence. I felt the same way now. Inside my head, I heard myself think, with weary resignation, Of course. Botfly larvae require living flesh.
It was impossible that he was alive, and yet he turned his head to look at me.
The sound of dry skin sliding across vertebrae was like a snake moving over stone.
With the eerie calm of the hurricane’s eye, I saw that the black stains on his face were actually insects clustered around his nose and mouth.