Chapter 16 #2
Which could only mean … he had not been dead.
My memory of the corpse speaking, the part that I had dismissed utterly, had been true.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is that possible?
Of course it was possible. I had remembered the manacles and the nails and the wire table, hadn’t I?
(botflies don’t live in dead flesh)
The candle flame wavered as my hands shook. Oh god. If I hadn’t convinced myself otherwise, could I have saved him?
And then, in a whisper like a drop of water falling into a cold pond, Are you sure that he’s really dead now?
I stared at the man on the table for a long time. I had to put the candle down because my hands would not stop shaking. Part of me knew that it was reckless to burn down my only source of light, but the panic had finally broken through my defenses.
It was not the kind of animal terror that sends you fleeing into the woods or that makes you beat your hands against a door until you collapse.
It was the hard savage kind that knots up under your breastbone and makes it hard to breathe and what fills your head is the knowledge that you will have to do something about it.
It is terrible to be helpless, but it can be equally terrible to be the one who is supposed to be able to help.
The thought came to me that Ma Kersey had probably felt this way many, many times, and somehow that was steadying.
“Right,” I said. My voice sounded high-pitched and shaky, but it still sounded like me, and that was worth something. I had watched my father drown in his own bed. This was worse, but it was still only dying, and I had faced dying before.
He can’t be alive. You’d smell piss and shit if he’d been down here a week. He must be dead.
I had to be sure.
“Can you hear me?” I asked.
There was no reply. A fly buzzed past me, shadow and gold.
“Please, if you can hear me, say something.”
Silence.
“Right,” I said again.
I did not want to touch that waxy flesh with my bare hands. Even if he was cold, that wouldn’t prove anything. There were cases of people buried alive who had been cold when they went in the ground.
I could not see that the man was breathing, but if it was very shallow, I might not see it, particularly not by candlelight.
I had no mirror to put in front of his nostrils, and the thought of laying my ear against that bony chest and listening for a heartbeat under the buzz of disturbed flies …
I shuddered. Perhaps, if there was no other choice, but there was something else to try first.
I pulled one sleeve protectively down over my hand, steeled myself, and waved away the flies on the man’s face.
Most of them buzzed up angrily, bumping against the fabric of my gown.
One blundered into the protective mesh in front of my face and clung there, a blurry shadow too close to bring into focus.
I batted it away, heard myself moan, and thought, Stop that. Whimpering won’t help.
Then I thought, Oh shut up, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, whimper if it makes you feel better.
One fly remained, crawling sluggishly across the man’s upper lip. I lifted my arm to bat at it again, realized that it might try to escape up his nostrils, and whimpered again without guilt.
Then I set a fabric-covered finger against his eyelid and pulled it back.
For a moment, I stared into a dark hole of pupil, and then it contracted down to a pinprick in the light of the candle.
I jumped back. The candle flame went out and I knew that I had to light a match and get it going again, but even doing that much seemed, momentarily, impossible. I leaned against the wooden table in the dark, overwhelmed.
He’s alive.
He’s still alive.
I hadn’t failed him—but now I had to get both of us out of here.
How long had the man been here?
How long does it take for someone’s fingernails to grow like that?
I shook my head in the dark. No. That was impossible. It would take years and no human could survive for years like that. The length of time hardly mattered though. To do this to someone for even five minutes would be monstrous.
Halder has been feeding him, not the insects. Except that the insects are feeding on him, so …
I blundered away, hearing the boards squelch under my feet. I had to sit down for a minute and get myself together. When I found the stairs, I climbed up and sat, still clutching the warm candle in nerveless fingers.
My great interest, Miss Wilson, is in parasitic and necrophagic species.
It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them.
But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.
Study them he had, in his own back garden. I had pictured cages of animals infected with botfly larvae and recoiled, but it had never occurred to me that Halder might have used a human model.
But why? Why would you do that? It’s so dangerous and for what? Why would anyone risk getting caught just to use a human?
And then something that had been slowly growing on my consciousness finally intruded, and I realized that while I was sitting there, the blackness had become more of a deep, deep gray and I could make out the edges of the table in front of me.
My eyes couldn’t possibly have adjusted.
This was the kind of pitch blackness that you found in deep caves.
And yet there was light coming from somewhere, the smallest hint of it, somewhere near the back, against one wall.
I could just barely see the edge of a sheet of burlap, a square of black against the faintest edge of illumination.
My heart leapt. Could there be another way out? A door hidden behind the wall? An escape?
Something scrabbled on the far side of the room. I saw movement and heard a muffled thump, followed by a splash.
I shot to my feet, and at that moment, the man said, in a painful rasp, “Please … no … don’t let them…!”
Another scrabbling sound. My brain was full of the possum trying to get through my bedroom door, the possum that had a botfly in its brain oh mother of God, I’d almost forgotten about those.
Except that I could get away, even if only to the top of the stairs, and the man chained to the table couldn’t.
Cold determination settled on me, like a glaze of winter frost. I hadn’t saved the dying man when I might have, so whatever happened to him now was my fault. So do something about it.
My hands didn’t shake as I struck one of my few remaining matches. Part of me was screaming with terror and wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and weep, but I didn’t have time for that now. I locked her away in a shed of her own and lit the candle.
Did I have anything that could be used as a weapon? My boots might serve if nothing else did. I swept my gaze over the room and spotted the enamel pan. Not heavy, but better than nothing. I picked it up, waiting.
With a scratch of claws, the intruder leapt up onto the man’s prison bed. The wavering candle light revealed … a squirrel?
Gray fur, long brushy tail. Unmistakably a squirrel.
It turned its head slightly, light glinting off one dark eye, and I saw the back of its head was strangely distorted, much too long.
I didn’t even need to see the dark circle of a botfly to know what had happened.
It made a perverse sort of sense. Cuterebra emasculator. Squirrel botfly.
Relief bolstered my resolve. I was pretty sure I could fend off a squirrel, no matter what was wrong with it. I lifted the pan and took a step forward.
“No!” said the man miserably, turning his face away.
I hesitated. Was he talking to me? Was I not supposed to protect him or…?
The squirrel flung itself across the man’s face, belly down. For a bizarre moment, I thought that it was trying to smother him and rushed forward, splashing through the shallow water.
Then I heard the crunch.
Blood poured over the man’s chin. His throat worked spasmodically.
The squirrel’s body seemed to collapse but it made no effort to escape.
It didn’t even show any signs of pain. It simply stared at me with bright black eyes while the man bit and swallowed and bit and swallowed and red crept over his cheeks and dripped through the wire mesh below.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t recoil. I stopped dead and simply stood, holding the candle and my makeshift weapon, and watched. My mind was a hollow silence.
At last, the squirrel pulled away. It was impossible for it to walk—it was cored to the backbone, like a watermelon eaten clear to the rind—yet walk it did. It crawled off his face and then it fell off the side and landed without a sound.
I circled the prison bed and saw, in the shadows there, a half dozen small bodies.
Squirrels, mostly. A rabbit. Something on the bottom that was probably a groundhog.
None of them more than a day or two old, all sporting the slack, bloody pockets of discarded warbles.
Much later, I would think they were probably the source of the faint rot I had smelled, but in the moment, I have no memory of thinking anything at all.
The newest body lay draped across the others. It wasn’t breathing, but then, it had nothing left to breathe with. It was dead. It had to be dead.
You thought that he was dead too.
It was the first thought to cross my mind in a full minute. It lay in isolation inside my skull, like a specimen pinned to a card.
The warble on the back of the squirrel’s head began to pulse, and the thought went away again.
It did not take long for the larva to emerge.
The thing was at least two inches long, so large in comparison to its host that it seemed impossible that it had been contained within the rodent’s skin.
I watched it thrash free of the skin cocoon and lay still for a moment, as if exhausted.
It was dark brown, its slug-like body divided into fat segments, the surface stippled instead of smooth.
I had labored for hours getting that stippling just right.
Ah, I thought inanely, the preservative did wash the color out. I will have to repaint it.
From illustrating the life cycle of the fly, I knew that its next move would be to burrow into the leaf litter and pupate. There was no leaf litter here, nor did I intend to give it the chance to pupate. I stepped forward, slid the edge of the pan underneath it, and flipped it into the water.
Its body jackknifed, but it did not sink. I brought down my boot, crushing it against the wet boards, seeing something yellowish puff into the water, before red clay rose up and covered it.
I looked at the man on the table. Blood coated his face and throat, already starting to dry. His eyes were closed. As I watched, tears began to trickle silently over his skin, etching pale tracks into the stain.
What I wanted in that moment was not answers, not explanations, not even freedom. What I wanted was for this not to be happening.
I turned away. I went up the stairs, pulled the drape aside, and sat down in the corner.
I pinched out the candle in an effort to save the few minutes of light that I had left.
I tucked my hands into my sleeves and pulled my skirt tight so that there was no exposed skin for anything to reach.
If I had had a blanket, I would have pulled it over my head to keep the monsters away.
And then, and only then, I let myself think again and stared, dry-eyed and dry-mouthed, into the dark.
I had told Phelps that I believed the Lord only sent us as much as we could handle. That was a lie, but even if I had believed it, I wouldn’t anymore, because this was too much.
Being kidnapped and shoved into a dark hole in the ground was terrible, but I could probably have coped with it.
Other people have dealt with things like that before.
A dying man riddled with parasites was horrible, but by itself, I could have managed.
Other people have dealt with things like that as well.
The history of the world is written in dying bodies and in those who have to pick up afterwards.
Combining the two was right at my limits, but I had managed. I had been coping.
But the gutted animals—that was simply too far. A merciful god would not have piled that on top of the other two. No one could be expected to deal with all three at once.
And yet, horrified and nauseated and scared out of my wits, I was still a naturalist, and even as I shuddered in the corner, wrapped in a cocoon of fabric, part of me was asking, How did he bite through the fur like that? How did he swallow the bones without choking?
I could still hear the thin crunch of the squirrel’s ribs giving way. I rested my forehead on my knees and tried to stop hearing it.
I wanted this not to be happening. I wanted the world to be different. I wanted it not to contain horrors.
Useless. “Wish in one hand, shit in the other,” Esther had said once, shocking me. “See which fills up first.” She’d been right though. Might as well wish for a world where your father hadn’t died and left you penniless, or a world where his friends had remembered that you existed.
At last, I did what overwhelmed people have done since time immemorial, and slept.