Chapter 20
A long time went by, or perhaps it only seemed like a long time. I was cold and wet and the water was full of blood. Flies buzzed through the air, settled, buzzed again. The soft, obscene sounds went on and on, until at last they stopped.
Eventually, Saul released his prey, and Phelps slid off the table and fell facedown into the water. I winced a little at the wet thudding noise the body made when it hit the boards, though I knew he was long past caring.
“I think,” said Saul, stretching as luxuriously as a man who was pinned to a table could, “that it is probably safe to release me now.”
He looked better. A lot better. The hollows in his ribs had filled out completely and there was muscle along his arms now. No one seeing him now would assume that he was dead or dying, and certainly not that he had been down here for an unspeakable length of time.
“Why aren’t you mad?” I asked, thinking about how long that year must have been.
“Who says I’m not?”
The gun was still in my lap. I picked it up.
Saul sighed. “Madness, for most people, is something that happens inside your brain. Something being damaged. But those parts heal like everything else. I would go a little mad for a time, I think, and then they’d toss me some food and the madness would heal. ”
I tried to picture what that must have been like and couldn’t.
Red fanned lazily through the water at my feet, a brilliant color that you only get with cadmium and other heavy metals.
And blood, of course. Most of Phelps’s blood had gone into Saul, but there was still enough to dye the water crimson.
“This is why you didn’t want me to set you free, isn’t it?
You thought you might do … that. To me.”
“Yes.”
I nodded. “You could have explained that to me.”
Saul gave me an ironic look. “Strangely enough, when you feed primarily on blood and entrails, you don’t go around telling everyone.”
Well, that was fair enough. “You told Louisa though.”
The cords of his neck stood out briefly as he lifted his head, then let it drop. “We could never have children, you see, and she deserved to know why. But I would have told her anyway.”
“Good.” I pushed myself to my feet.
“I would have dealt with those children too, if I’d been here. Poor doomed souls. I heard rumors about them and came as quickly as I could, but of course it was much too late by then. I might have been able to save them, if I’d heard about them sooner.”
“Save them?”
“It wasn’t their fault. They were like ducklings raised by hens, with no one to teach them how to swim.
It is not easy to be what we are, but there are …
ways … to mitigate it. To do as little harm as possible.
Not the sort of things a child could work out for themselves.
They would have only known that they were not like others, and prey to a monstrous hunger they could not possibly explain. ”
I thought of Jackson’s grandmother, telling him tales of blood and hunger, and wondered how many of those tales came from Saul’s people, or from their abandoned children. I would have liked to feel sorry for those doomed three-month babies. Perhaps someday I would.
“Ma Kersey said they were born with sharp teeth,” I said.
“Yes.”
His teeth looked perfectly normal at the moment.
I wondered whether the sharper teeth folded back against the roof of his mouth, like a snake’s fangs?
No, surely that would affect his speech, give him some kind of lisp, wouldn’t it?
Unless the upper palate was significantly deeper or perhaps had a slot for the teeth to fit into …
“They’re in my throat,” said Saul, rolling his eyes. “I’d offer to show you, but I don’t want you to run away screaming before you unlock these things. After that, you can run away screaming whenever you like. I may too, actually.”
I rubbed my forehead. “Are you a vampire, then?”
He made a scoffing sound. “Is a manatee a mermaid?”
“Only if you’re desperate to see mermaids, I suppose.”
“There you go, then.” He pursed his lips. “Incidentally, while this is a fascinating conversation, I suspect I’d enjoy it even more if I wasn’t chained to a table.”
“Right,” I said, setting the gun down on the table and examining the manacles. They were still as unyielding as ever. “I could go out and get a file. No, what am I thinking? I’ll go get Jackson—”
“No!”
I blinked at him. “But the door is open now.”
“I would rather not have anyone see me like this,” said Saul, returning to his former dryness. “Specifically, covered with blood alongside Phelps’s corpse.”
Ah. Quite. “I take it the Kents don’t know, then.”
“Rose knows that there is something odd about me, but not the exact shape of it. I prefer that as few … err … of your people know as possible. It is safer for everyone that way. If you can get me free now, that would be best.”
(It occurred to me much later that what Saul actually feared was that I would leave and not come back. But that was later, and my capacity for clearheaded thought was not high at the moment.)
Saul looked down at the manacles. “I can probably rip them out, if you remove the nails.”
“Nails?” I looked blankly at his overgrown fingernails.
“There are nails in my forearms,” he said patiently. “Also my shoulders and both shins. They prevent me from pulling my hands and feet out of the manacles.”
I had to brace my forearms against the table for a minute to hold myself up. “Oh.”
Completely logical, of course. You’d need something like that if you were imprisoning someone who knew they’d heal up even if they managed to pulp their own hand yanking it free. Halder had clearly thought things through with monstrous thoroughness.
The nails were placed just behind the wrist bones. Skin had actually grown over the top of the left one, which was probably why I had missed seeing it before. They had been hammered into the wooden cross beams on the table in a horrible parody of crucifixion.
Calm Me took over again, because otherwise I was going to begin screaming and not stop until my lungs gave out.
“Right,” I said again. I set my fingers on the right nail, pulled, got exactly nowhere.
Saul’s skin was still too cool. Squirrel botflies disliked human hosts because we were too cold.
I wondered if these had adapted to a wider range of hosts.
“I can’t get it out,” I said. “Give me a minute.” I prowled the room, trying to find something that I could use as pliers. My eyes fell on the rusted forceps. If they didn’t fall apart when I tried to use them, perhaps that would work.
“I hope I don’t give you tetanus,” I muttered.
“I don’t believe I can get it.”
“Lucky you.” The forceps didn’t want to open at first, but eventually yielded, though not before leaving red handleprints in my fingers. I hooked them under the head of the nail, pulled, got nowhere, started to wiggle them back and forth, then stopped. “Oh god, I’m sorry. That must hurt.”
“Yes, but having you cut my arm off will hurt a lot more.” I froze. Saul’s smile was ghastly. “You don’t want to know what I’ll do to be free of this place.”
I set back to work. After a few seconds, the nail actually slid a little way out of the board and I redoubled my efforts. “Thank god this was here,” I muttered.
“That’s what Halder used to dig the screwworms out,” Saul said pleasantly. And then, “If you keep stopping every time you’re horrified, we’ll never get out of here. My people can die of old age.”
“How … fascinating…” I said through gritted teeth as I worked.
A moment later, it came loose from the wood.
I could actually feel the—texture? viscosity?
—of the flesh change as the nail slid out through gristle and flesh.
It was incredibly nauseating, but I told myself that I wasn’t the one with a nail in my arm so I wasn’t allowed to be sick.
I leaned on the table and breathed heavily through my nose, then gave a final tug and pulled it free.
Clear fluid seeped through the hole. Saul lifted his forearm as far as he could, flexed it, and nodded. “If we both pull on the manacle now…”
I wrapped more burlap over my hands, grabbed the rusted metal, and pulled with all my strength, while Saul shoved upward.
The metal bolts held. The wood did not. Months of damp took their toll with a splintery crunch. Saul’s arm jerked up, the manacle and a chunk of wood clinging to his wrist like a bracelet.
“Oh god,” he said, with a moan that might have been pleasure or pain or both. “You have no idea how it feels to bend your elbow for the first time in a year.”
I shook my head, moving to the other manacle, but Saul waved me off, reached over, and plucked the nail out of his left wrist as if it were a splinter. The second manacle yielded immediately to his two-handed assault.
It began to occur to me that, manatee or mermaid, Saul was substantially stronger than an ordinary human being.
He flexed both arms, then began calmly snapping the overgrown nails off each hand. I didn’t want to watch, but I did anyway.
Saul had barely finished when he suddenly slapped a hand down against his chest, once, twice, then again. At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing, then I saw the dark smears left behind.
“You little bastards,” Saul said, his voice thick with feeling, and began swatting at the flies on his face. Some buzzed out of range, then began to settle again, and were immediately crushed.
I slid my hands into my sleeves and simply waited. If any man on earth had ever deserved to swat a fly, it was Saul Gregor.
With the flies dead, he lay quiet for a moment. I assumed that he was recovering from the pain. The underside of both arms was a ragged mass of torn skin, and I couldn’t imagine how his joints felt, moving after so long.
“Best done quickly,” Saul said finally—and sat up.