Epilogue
As I write this, it has been eleven months since Halder’s death, and I am still living in the house that Louisa’s money built.
Observations on the Habits and Developmental Stages of Parasitic Insects will be published tomorrow, written by an enterprising young doctor named Ainsley.
It includes plates credited to Sonia Wilson and Louisa Gregor, and while it is unlikely to be in most drawing rooms, I am told that it will be invaluable to academics in the field.
Halder’s name appears only in the author’s note, where Ainsley notes that his widow very graciously bequeathed his notes and his collection to the author, which “went a fair way to making this work possible.”
(I still don’t believe in Phelps’s devil, but if He exists, I imagine He read that author’s note aloud to Halder. Eternal flame would not even begin to compare.)
Louisa and I sat around drinking Jackson’s moonshine the day that the acceptance letter arrived from the publisher, toasting each insect more and more extravagantly.
By the time we reached Rex the C. hominivorax, we were both sitting on the floor giggling helplessly, and Rose took our drinks away and told us that we were setting a terrible example for Sally, then finished both cups off herself.
Now that it’s done, Louisa has been urging me to write the book about medicinal herbs that I kept imagining.
I’ve been working on it off and on. Hopefully with my name out there as a scientific illustrator, another publisher will be willing to take a chance.
(Ma Kersey says that I should call it Ma Kersey’s Wit and Wisdom and include a section on remedies to enhance male virility.
I still can’t quite tell if she’s serious, but if I do write it, she’ll get half the money. It’s her knowledge, after all.)
I live in Halder’s rooms now. They don’t hold the memories for me that they do for Louisa, and the light is almost as good.
I offered to move out again, but Louisa said that while she’d be damned if she was moving out of the house that her money built, it was too big a house for just her and Saul and the Kents.
I allowed her to persuade me. Louisa is still a better painter than I am, but I am a better naturalist, probably because Halder rarely bothered to teach her anything.
Between the two of us, I truly believe that we’ll make some fine books.
Saul and Louisa were married last spring, once enough time had passed that no one could connect him to the deaths.
The story was that he had seen the notice of the doctor’s death in the papers and come back to propose to his lost love.
The people who might have been surprised about Saul’s reappearance would have had to admit that they thought Saul had been murdered and hadn’t done anything about it, so the matter was allowed, somewhat gracelessly, to drop.
Ma Kersey, I suspect, knows more than she lets on.
But she keeps her own counsel, and in return, Saul keeps her table liberally supplied with venison and the world-famous Chatham rabbit.
And if the deer has been drained and gutted before being delivered …
well, that’s simply how one field dresses a carcass, after all, and there’s nothing unusual about it.
The wedding was held at Rose Kent’s church, because Louisa insisted that Rose be the matron of honor and even this long after the war, some people who call themselves Christians have opinions about Black folk in white church ceremonies.
The preacher was happy to do it, and his sermon was only about fifteen minutes long, which for him was a great sacrifice.
Not long after the wedding, Rose informed us that she and Jackson were leaving. Louisa offered her anything she wanted if she’d stay, but she refused. “It isn’t you,” she said. “I stayed here too long, hating myself for it, and now I’m leaving all that behind. Finally.”
They didn’t go all that far. We see her Sunday at church.
She laughs more than she did and she looks younger, and sometimes we all look at one another and remember that there’s a secret between us, but it doesn’t last long.
Sally’s cousin came to be the housekeeper, and she’s good at it, but not half the cook that Rose Kent is.
The shed in the woods was demolished not long after Louisa returned.
Saul and Jackson pulled down the support timbers below and the next heavy rain brought the whole structure down, leaving only a deep, water-filled hole.
In spring, the chorus frogs sang from the edges and the green-lipped bronze frogs laid gelatinous masses of eggs.
It may fill in over the years, but until then, it serves the frogs well.
I am glad that they get some use of it, but I avoid it myself. So does Saul.
As for the other residents of that miserable hole … well. Saul has stalked the woods for months, looking for animals infested with the strange parasites that had grown in his flesh. He found plenty in the early days, but none since winter. Possibly that means that they have all been wiped out.
Possibly it simply means that they learned not to try to feed him.
I still don’t know what to make of the wolf worms. Ainsley—who I chose because he was the only person who was not a condescending ass when I wrote to Halder’s many correspondents—and who knows only that there was an unusual mutation among the Cuterebra population—suggested that the speed at which they reproduced may have made them vulnerable to a fluctuation in the host population.
If too many squirrels were already weakened by botflies, then having the next wave of flies show up in a week would not give them time to recover.
It’s as good a theory as any. Mr. Darwin tells us that it does not matter if something is extremely well-adapted to survive, if it is not also well-adapted to reproduce.
And perhaps the flies themselves, deprived of their part of their life cycle bathed in the strange fluids in Saul’s flesh, reverted back to their normal behavior, and now are no different from any others that one might find, except perhaps capable of surviving in a wider range of hosts.
Every now and then, I will see a black-and-gold fly in the garden.
Even now, my throat closes up. It took some time before I stopped panicking at the sight of bumblebees, but I managed eventually.
It is hard to be afraid of creatures who fly headlong at flowers and miss more often than not. But I still cannot abide the flies.
I have never quite shed the vision of Phelps clawing at his scalp as he was dragged forward by his own traitorous limbs.
I suspect that I never will. There are nights when I feel something touch me and my skin crawls so fiercely that I have to light the lamps and change the sheets before I can lie down again.
There are dreams where I feel lumps moving in my flesh, and when I touch them, I realize that there is something living inside.
Once or twice, I’ve caught a glimpse of an animal watching me from the woods.
They never get close enough for me to see if there is a wolf worm riding them.
I know that it is unlikely, I know that multiple generations have come and gone and it is unlikely that they have survived.
I know that a mere insect can’t possibly recognize my face or think of me as the person that took their prey away.
I know all this, and yet I do not walk in the woods the way that I used to. Not alone, at any rate.
And yet, despite this, I stay here. Because the wolf worms are not the only thing I fear. I have had too many dreams where I am devoured alive by some creature inside me, a three-month babe waiting for its chance to be born.
It is very hard for me to look at strangers now without wondering if they’re truly human.
I force myself to travel, to go out among people I do not know, but even knowing that I am far more likely to run afoul of my own species, I cannot quite put aside that fear.
Even among humans, not everyone is as strong as Saul, to choose another way.
I sit on the train and people smile at me, and even as I smile back, I wonder if there is another set of teeth behind it.
Some thoughts burrow into your mind as thoroughly as a wasp larva burrows into an unsuspecting caterpillar.
The trick, which I am still learning, is how to live without being devoured by them.