Chapter 19
My captor had a much larger lantern in one hand and another basket over his arm. He set the basket down on the step with exaggerated care, reached into his vest, and pulled out a gun.
The barrel winked in the orange light. I stared at it blankly. My brain said Prussian blue and burnt umber for the metal, antimony orange for the reflections. This was not helpful under the circumstances.
“Move away from him, Miss Wilson,” Phelps said, leveling the gun at Saul. “He’s dangerous.”
“He’s chained to a table.”
“I feel she makes a valid point,” said Saul, sounding as if he were standing in someone’s parlor, not naked and tied to a table. “Don’t you, Phelps?”
The gun trembled. This didn’t make me feel any more confident.
A scared man with a gun is much more dangerous than a confident one.
What if he shot Saul? What if, after everything, the man bled out in front of me?
And it will be your responsibility if he does, because you didn’t get help that first night.
I would like to say that I thought about what I was doing, that it was an act of considered courage, but it wasn’t.
I didn’t really think about what I was doing.
I just clutched the pan in front of me with both hands and walked slowly forward, until I planted myself between Saul and the cold eye of the gun.
Phelps bit his lip. He looked awful. His skin looked looser and he seemed to have aged a decade since the night before. His hair stuck out from his skull in ragged clots and his eyes showed white all around the iris.
“Miss Wilson, you need to get away from him.” His voice was pleading now. “I brought you more food and more lamp oil. Knew this one wouldn’t last all day and I hated to think of you down here in the dark. Just … just come over here. Please.”
My nails scraped on the enameled pan as I gripped it more tightly. Would it stop a bullet? Probably not. I didn’t think Phelps would shoot me, but I didn’t want to find out. I took a deep breath.
“What Halder has done to this man is monstrous,” I said. “But we can still make this right. Just help me—”
“He ain’t a man,” snapped Phelps. “Don’t you understand? He’s one of them.”
“One of what?”
“Devils.” Phelps’s hand twitched and the gun jittered sideways. My flinch must have been visible, because he set the lantern down and took a two-handed grip on the pistol.
Devils? Oh god, was this the shape of his delusion? My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I tried to figure out how to navigate these waters.
“They look like us,” said Phelps, “but they ain’t human. I’ve seen it, Miss Wilson. I know. They’re blood thieves.”
I swallowed. “Mr. Phelps,” I said carefully, “I know that there was a frightening incident a few years back. I know that there were a lot of stories around the … the two people … doing those awful things. But you have to understand that people were whipping themselves into a frenzy. Like a sort of lynch mob. The stories that people made up afterward, they weren’t real. ”
Phelps closed his eyes briefly. If I had been closer, perhaps I would have gone for the gun. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. When he opened them again, he was looking at me almost pityingly.
“Miss Wilson, they weren’t just stories. I know you’re educated and think you know better, but I was there. That girl we buried was a devil and I know that for God’s own truth.”
My knuckles were beginning to ache from clutching the pan so tightly, but I couldn’t make them relax. “How do you know, Mr. Phelps? Did Halder tell you? Because—”
“I know,” Phelps interrupted me, “because I killed her twice.”
I am not always the quickest thinker. My response to this dramatic statement was to say, “Err … what?”
Saul made a sound behind me, the faintest huff, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t quite dare.
“There were two of ’em,” said Phelps. He sat down on the step, lowering the gun barrel just a fraction. I didn’t fool myself that he couldn’t snap it back up in a hurry. “Never saw the boy until the end, but I recognized that girl right enough.”
“Oh?” I said. Every minute he’s talking is a minute he isn’t shooting. And it’s daylight, so maybe someone will have seen him.
He nodded. “About six months earlier. Had a couple of shoats penned up. Heard squealing one night and grabbed my gun. Thought maybe a bear decided he wanted a taste of pork. Only it wasn’t a bear.”
“What was it, then?”
“It was that girl. Three pigs dead, with bites taken out of ’em.
Lotta bites. Couldn’t quite get through the hide, but she’d kept trying ’til she hit a spot on the throat she could get through.
And the fourth one…” He stopped and swiped a hand at his hair, which turned into pawing at the back of his head, a terrible grimace on his face.
It reminded me of how a dog will sometimes scratch its ear until it begins to yelp in pain, but doesn’t stop scratching.
The gun lurched back and forth and my stomach lurched with it.
“Mr. Phelps—”
He shook himself. “Sorry, Miss Wilson.”
“You should have Ma Kersey look at that again,” I said. “It might be infected.”
Phelps tilted his head, still doglike. “You really don’t know,” he said almost wonderingly.
“As wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove,” Saul said, speaking up for the first time. “You should let her go, Phelps. She’s got no part of this.”
“The Devil quotes Scripture,” Phelps said, his eyes narrowing.
“Shut up,” I hissed to Saul. And to Phelps, more loudly, “You were telling me about the pigs, Mr. Phelps?”
“Oh, aye.” He shook himself. “That fourth pig wasn’t dead. It was sat half in her lap and she was tearing chunks out of its face and it let her do it.”
I was suddenly horribly conscious of the pile of dead animals who had let themselves be gutted. Keep him talking. “That must have been very … ah … unsettling.”
“Yes, Miss Wilson, it was.” With anyone else, I might have suspected sarcasm, but Phelps sounded earnest. “I didn’t know about the devils then. I shot her.”
My eyes dropped down to the gun again. I had been hoping that Phelps had a philosophical objection to shooting women, but apparently I was being thwarted at every turn today.
He gestured with the gun. “Would have been a lot of questions. People would have seen a dead girl and not what she was doing. I was a different person then. I’m not proud of what I did, but I dumped the body in the woods, as far away as I could take her, and hoped nobody’d come looking. And nobody did.”
I had one unbroken nail left after digging. I felt it break against the metal pan and looked down, bemused, at my own white fingers, as if they belonged to someone else. “Ah,” I said.
Phelps’s gaze was unfocused. I don’t think he was even seeing me anymore, though he’d probably focus quick enough if I moved. “When word came down they’d cornered the devils who did for all those people, I grabbed my gun and went out. And there she was. Exactly the same.”
Things were slotting into place in my head that I didn’t like, all of them just as impossible as Saul having been locked down here for more than a year. Nevertheless, I wasn’t ready to completely abandon reason yet. “It may have simply been a family resemblance or—”
“She recognized me too. Asked if I was gonna shoot her again.”
“You must have been mistaken about—”
“She left half her guts on the floor of my hogpen.”
I stopped talking.
“Hope you didn’t let any of the hogs eat that,” said Saul, with a clicking chuckle.
Phelps had hunched over as he spoke, but now he stood up straight, unfolding himself like a praying mantis. I took a hasty step back and felt my back bang into Saul’s table. Something landed on the back of my neck and I had a horrible feeling that it was a botfly.
“I told ’em,” Phelps said. “I told ’em that a bullet wasn’t enough. I told ’em those two were devils. They didn’t want to listen, but the preacher finally did. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Ma Kersey’s description of the dead girl eating clay beat against my brain like a fly trapped in a cup. I lifted my hand, trying not to make any movements that might startle Phelps, and slapped at the back of my neck. Wings brushed my hand and I shuddered.
“Mr. Phelps,” I said, desperate to keep him talking, “perhaps you’re right. Perhaps that girl had … had a condition unknown to science. But it does not follow—”
(thin bones crunching under Saul’s teeth)
“—that Mr. Gregor has it as well.”
“Miss Wilson,” Phelps said wearily, as if I were a particularly slow pupil, “I watched the doctor put two bullets in him. One in the knee and one in the back. Both of ’em came out the other side. Look at him now. Do you see any scars?”
I blinked foolishly then turned around, my eyes sweeping over Saul’s prone body. His knees both looked like perfectly ordinary knees. I hastily averted my eyes from his groin, but his belly and ribs were smooth and unmarked by anything but the dark bodies of resting flies.
He must have been mistaken. There’d be enormous scars. He’d never walk again.
Halder missed. Or this isn’t the same man. Or …
My gaze continued, inexorably, up to Saul Gregor’s face. He met my eyes and his lips twisted in a small, rueful smile. Then he nodded.
“Really?” I said weakly.
“I could have gotten away if it wasn’t for the knee,” Saul said. “We heal very fast, but even our kind can’t run on a shattered joint.”
Oh.
Say that you were a scientist who studied parasites.
There is only so much that you can observe from dead specimens.
You need to watch their process through living flesh.
But host animals are small and often hard to keep alive, particularly if you wish them to be infested over and over.
How often can you pull a screwworm out of a rabbit before it dies of massive infection?
Say that you learned about another kind of human. One who heals at an astonishing rate. One that feeds on blood and viscera and who can endure astonishing hardships.