Chapter 16
I would like to tell you that I was brave and practical and resourceful, that I immediately took stock of my situation and began plotting my escape. But in truth, I slid down the wall to the floor, put my head against my knees, and began to sob.
It was all simply too much. I had been anxious and fearful and then I had been horribly ill and then I had been attacked and now I was imprisoned. Even that was far too much to bear, without even considering what lay in wait at the bottom of the steps.
You can’t keep the Devil locked up.
I shoved the thought aside. Not important right now. What’s important is getting out.
The door wasn’t going to open. I wasn’t going to be able to break it down without tools of some sort. My best hope would be if someone came looking for me. Someone other than Phelps, obviously.
I forced myself to think logically. Neither of the Kents were likely to wander by the shed on their own. Sally certainly wouldn’t. Once they knew I was missing, they would definitely look for me though. But when would that be?
Probably not until I don’t come down to dinner. Mrs. Kent will check to make sure I haven’t fallen ill again. By that time, Phelps will probably be long gone.
Had Jackson seen us talking? It was possible. He’d been busy, and we’d been on the other side of the grounds. He could have looked up at the right moment and seen Phelps and I walking away together, but I couldn’t count on it.
All Phelps had to do was claim that he hadn’t seen me. Hell, if I were Phelps, I’d pretend to be worried and join in the search, and take the woods right here so that nobody else could hear me yelling.
Mrs. Kent would suspect Phelps of having something to do with it, but what could she do? This was still North Carolina and she’d be a Black woman accusing a white man of something, without any proof to offer the authorities.
Panic tried to rise in my throat. I studied it as dispassionately as I might a specimen I was preparing to paint. Phelps had said he was waiting for Halder. Even if no one found me, I had only to wait until the doctor’s return.
Granted, he had already spent a week in Raleigh, but he must be due to return soon. He had only the one specimen, and Jackson hadn’t caught any others. I just had to wait until this unexpected research angle had run its course.
The panic tried to rise again, more strongly.
That could take weeks. Father had once become so obsessed with carnivorous sundews from the Sandhills that he spent three months there, sending occasional letters to reassure me that he was fine, and only the onset of winter had actually driven him home.
I tried to imagine spending months in the shed and felt a sob wrack my body like a blow.
No, no. Phelps is not going to keep you here for months. He said he’d wire Halder to tell him there’s a problem.
When Halder gets back, surely he’ll see this is ridiculous.
Surely.
I found that I wasn’t as sure of that as I had been a few hours ago.
I stretched out my hand and touched the heavy drape in front of me. Somewhere, down in the dark, was something that Halder wanted to keep hidden. Something that Phelps was helping him keep hidden.
Something that he thought he’d hang for.
You know what it has to be. The body must have been real. Not a hallucination brought on by malaria, but a real thing that I had seen and then tried to convince myself I hadn’t.
But …
No “but”s! Think!
The memory was blurry, as if I’d poured water over a painting and left only the ghosts of colors behind, but it hadn’t vanished. Dreams fade, but this hadn’t. On some level, I must have known that, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to convince myself that I hadn’t.
Why had I been so desperate to believe that it wasn’t true?
Because it was horrible. Because it was frightening.
My lips twisted. No. That hadn’t been the reason, not really.
Because you would have had to do something about it.
I had talked myself into continuing to work for a man I knew was a murderer. But there was a difference between hearing gossip and discovering an actual corpse—
(if it was really just a corpse)
—being kept in a shed. So I had seized on an explanation that explained it away, that allowed me to keep doing the work I wanted so much to do. I had fallen into relief the way that some people fall into love, and let it blind me.
Of course, the malaria probably helped.
I laughed, even if it came out half a sob.
Yes, the malaria had helped. I had seen things that couldn’t possibly be real, which made it easier to dismiss everything else.
Even now, I wasn’t entirely certain of what I had seen.
The body, yes, the flies … probably … but surely not all of it could have been real. It defied imagination.
And why would Phelps be so afraid of a corpse? Defiling a dead body was a crime, but it certainly wasn’t a hanging offense, unless you were the one who had made the body dead in the first place.
Could that be the secret? Was Phelps killing people for the doctor to experiment on? I tried to imagine Phelps doing something so obviously sinful and couldn’t. Then I tried to imagine Phelps killing people he thought were sinners, and that was much easier.
There’s a way to find out, you know.
I wiped my tear-slicked face. I still had the matches that I had put in my apron days ago, and the candle that had condemned me.
Stop sniveling. Quit telling yourself stories and go look.
Light flared up under my hands as I struck a match.
I found the beekeeper’s veil on the peg where Phelps had said it would be.
It was the one I’d seen before, that I’d thought looked like a lady’s hat.
That certainly argued that there were insects down below.
Probably I hadn’t completely hallucinated that either.
(black-and-yellow flies buzzing against your skin)
I set the candle down and pulled the veil on, then unbuttoned my collar and shoved the gauzy fabric down into my shirt. It probably looked ridiculous, but I was far past caring about that. Nothing should be able to crawl under it this way.
Now go down the stairs and find out what’s real.
The water level had subsided somewhat, or perhaps it had never been as deep as I thought.
When I stepped down onto the boards, sediment puffed up from underneath and diffused through the water like smoke.
The burlap sacks that lined the walls were stained green with algae and had turned black near the bottom.
Had I noticed that before? I couldn’t remember.
The wooden table was as I remembered it. Enamel pan, rusted forceps. I took a deep breath and lifted the candle, looking toward the back of the room.
My throat closed up.
I had expected the body. I truly had. I had even expected the flies crawling on the dead man’s face. And I had also expected that my memory of it was not perfect, that the fever had warped my perceptions.
But I had not expected reality to be so very, very different.
Memory said the corpse was a brown mummified husk, but memory had lied.
This man was only recently dead, his skin ghastly blue-white.
He was monstrously thin, but the hollows in his ribs were those of hunger, not of skin sealed against bone.
As I watched, a black-and-yellow fly crawled across them, reaching the summit of a rib and then descending into the valley beyond.
I swept the candle flame from side to side, my horror giving way to a deeper bafflement. Could I have truly been that wrong?
(you’re always lying to yourself) hissed my anxiety.
Stop that, answered the cool scientific voice. This has nothing to do with you. That body is fresh. It cannot have been here for a week.
I sniffed cautiously, smelling algae and clay and still air. Was there a trace of rot? I thought there was, but not nearly a week’s worth. The underground room might be significantly cooler than the outside air, but it wasn’t remotely cold enough to keep a body fresh.
My eyes swept down the body to his hands.
I had been almost certain that the impossibly long nails were hallucinatory, but I had been wrong.
They still looked more like brittle, distorted claws than fingers.
And there were the manacles, which I had very much hoped were a dream, and the wire mesh table, and …
I closed my eyes for a moment, told myself that I was a naturalist and not squeamish, then leaned over and looked underneath the wire mesh.
Pale flesh hanging like grapes, stretched around the bodies of insect larvae.
Oh god, not a dream at all. I forced myself to look, to compare it with my memory, and here it seemed that delirium had exaggerated, because my mind had screamed that there were masses of the things, dozens of bloated warbles larger than my fists, and there were not quite so many as that.
Oh good. Merely horrific instead of apocalyptic. How nice.
I straightened hastily. The room lurched a little and I looked away from the body and stared at the ordinary wooden table until it steadied again.
Well. Now I knew … something. But what?
Think logically. Assemble your evidence.
If the body was fresh, what did that mean?
What if this wasn’t the corpse I had seen? Phelps must have brought it here in the last day or two. That would explain why he had been so alarmed by what I had seen, and why he believed that he would hang for it.
That would mean that he and Halder have been killing people. Possibly lots of people.
(oh god)
(Halder won’t let me out if he thinks that I know, I’m going to die down here, they’re going to shackle me to that table and put botflies in me and—)
The cool voice was back again, driving the sudden panic aside. That is one possibility, yes. What is the evidence against it?
My eyes were drawn back to the gruesome fingernails. Surely there were not two men with nails like that in Chatham County. There might not be two men like that in the Carolinas. This must be the same man that I had seen before.