Chapter 6 Wake for the Rag Moth
The rag moth’s smell was a living animal.
It circled the cabin like a panther. Part old library, part condemned warehouse.
It kept Green company as the sunlight disappeared from the cabin’s one small window.
Holding a wake meant monitoring the moth overnight, being on hand to observe any changes in the corpse.
That afternoon, Valentina had laid out more rules for his apprenticeship:
“You will not open locked doors. You will not enter my living quarters uninvited. You will not fiddle with any equipment you do not understand. You will not visit the roof of the library under any circumstances. You will not discuss our work publicly without my prior approval.”
He really didn’t think any of the prohibitions needed to be said. He wanted to discuss his new job with strangers about as much as he wanted to climb onto the camp’s roofs. Not at all.
She sent him to gather his things, making a special point of telling him to leave his car at his campsite.
“I detest cars,” she said.
He visited Dancer to return her cup and explain how he had solved his shelter problem for the night.
She thanked him for the cup and was bewildered by the news that he would be staying with Valentina. She had to confirm several times that they were talking about the same woman who lived down Moss Man’s Row. Green thought she came close to calling him a liar.
He used an expensive waterproof ground cover as a tarp to shelter his broken windshield, holding it in place with heavy stones and a fallen branch.
When he gathered his belongings to take to Valentina’s, he found that most of what was relevant fit into his backpack.
Clothes. Food. Toiletries and medical supplies.
A gravity filter he didn’t expect to need.
Flashlight. A notebook and a battered old copy of My Side of the Mountain he’d bought at a fifth-grade book fair. He meant to reread it in the mountains.
He respected his new teacher’s feelings about cars and moved his supplies on foot.
With his sleeping bag under one arm and a water jug in the other, it took only one trip.
He felt some small vertigo when he compared his possessions in that moment to his possessions six months earlier.
Maybe for the first time, he felt no strong pull to mourn the discrepancy.
Valentina gave him a quick tour of her campsite.
Frustratingly quick.
She dismissed the giant tree house with a wave and a word. “Library.” It was the same with most of the structures.
“Lab.”
“Storage.”
“Faraday cage.”
“Crawler tunnel access.”
She paused after pointing out the tunnel access.
“Keep well away from this one. Like the library roof, it is especially off-limits.”
It wasn’t much of a job orientation.
His task for the night was straightforward enough. Watch the rag moth. Valentina’s reason for the assignment was similarly simple.
“Because I don’t know what may happen,” she said.
“Might something happen?”
“Always.”
“Uh, anything specific come to mind?”
“Yes and no. Rag moth corpses never last. They vanish. A fair number have been studied, perhaps a dozen, but you won’t find one preserved under glass or suspended in formaldehyde.
No one knows what happens to them. Digital recording does not work.
And, as far as I can tell from past accounts, this one is due to disappear at any moment.
Thus, my reluctance to be away from the cabin. ”
“Okay, do you have a theory about how it will vanish?”
“Many, but we have a specimen present, so observation eclipses hypothesis.”
“Is there anything, I don’t know, particular I’m watching for?”
“Just watch. Mr. Green, I have barely slept since I laid the specimen on that table. I need you to stay vigilant while I recover my energy. Forced to guess, I would say the corpse may spontaneously disintegrate. Perhaps some residual mechanism of the moth’s entropy defense will destroy the body.
Again, your job is to leave aside prediction and focus on observation. ”
“What’s stopping that residual mechanism from destroying me?”
“Past evidence. One rag moth corpse vanished from a workbench beside an aquarium housing fire-bellied newts. The newts were unharmed.”
“Comforting, I guess. What if these corpses are reawakening and just flying off? Maybe it wouldn’t be intimidated by newts. What if it just resurrects and mummifies me?”
“Very unlikely. That would have been evident in past disappearances.”
“Unlikely? Just unlikely?”
“I shan’t tell you it’s impossible.”
“So, what do I do if it wakes up?”
“You remember a fundamental truth of studying cryptids.”
“And what’s that?”
“These are animals. Same as you or me. They are not demons or monsters. They are not human-centric punishments or objects of elemental terror. They are nature. So? You tell me. What happens if the moth awakens? What should you do?”
Green felt a jolt of annoyance at her words. She wasn’t sitting in the car when the unearthly thing licked the blood from his face. She hadn’t spent the last few months being chased out of her life by an inexplicable acorn and a memory with dark feathers and edges too sharp to touch.
He forced himself to set aside his anger and consider her words. What if the moth was like any other animal? The creature had a deadly defense mechanism, but if it didn’t need defending…
“I stay still. Inconspicuous.”
Valentina smiled.
“Exactly. Respect it as a living thing. Acknowledge its dignity.”
“And if the wolf comes back to visit? I don’t suppose that cabin door is actually reinforced steel disguised as wood.”
“I have more subtle protections here than just doors and locks. In time, I will educate you about them.”
He didn’t like it, but she wouldn’t say more.
After some minorly patronizing answers to Green’s questions about operating the stove (“wood plus fire equals heat”), Valentina left Green to his vigil, unaccompanied but for that living, pacing smell and the stone-dead moth laid out like the spilled guts of an overturned trash can.
Alone, Green looked around the cabin that felt strangely like a home despite its disturbing owner and contents.
There was something solid and comforting about the place.
It was the old coffee cup rings on a wooden chest by the stove.
It was the frayed pot holder hanging on a hook.
It was the hundred small signs of a life being lived.
Somehow, the warmth, comfort, and stillness of the place magnified the pain of his battered face, as if he had finally found a calm enough moment to really feel it.
He couldn’t stop fingering his swollen nose or the gash on his chin.
Valentina had said that he didn’t need stitches, but his whole face ached in rhythm with his pulse.
He stood over the moth and was surprised to find that he was not afraid.
This encounter was different. He wasn’t in the passive mode.
The moth was not happening to him. He was studying it.
Not only that, but the moth was not solely his phantom with which to contend.
It was a part of Valentina’s world too. The situation held danger, but it also handed him both agency and connection.
It shattered his worries about slipping sanity and hallucinations.
It was evidence that his new path might not be characterized only by isolation and constant flight from unknowable dangers.
At first, Green tried to actively watch the moth.
He scrutinized a leg. An antenna. The lightless gem of a polyhedral eye.
When that became exhausting, he tried to relax his focus and take in the creature as a whole, a brownish something on a brownish table.
It was a confusion of textures and shapes.
It was a profound mystery fading to background static with time and attention, like bones bleaching in the sun.
He tried to tease out an interesting observation about the swirling aura of motes just above the moth’s body, hoping for something that would prove himself a quick study and a worthy apprentice.
It was no use. The motes clotted into a tan haze that was nearly invisible and constantly in motion.
Two minutes of watching invited a dull ache behind his eyes.
He began to shift his perspective on the night’s job. He decided his task wasn’t to watch the moth. His purpose was just to be there if the moth did anything worth noticing.
This attitude shift had pros and cons.
Pro: He wouldn’t have to spend the night staring at a disturbing insect corpse the size of a car hood.
Con: If the disturbing insect corpse suddenly came to life, Green might not notice in time to impersonate a very harmless piece of furniture.
He walked circles around the table. He pulled wood from the log cradle and fed the stove.
It got too warm in the cabin and he fed the stove again anyway.
He opened the door a crack to let in some air.
He thought of the wolf and latched it again.
The heat wasn’t that bad. He nodded at the ripe dumpster smell of the moth and wondered how long it would take for it to leave his hair and clothes.
Not long after nightfall, Valentina brought in propane lanterns.
“I’m cutting the power to preserve battery life,” she said. “Keep these on low and they’ll last most of the night. Here’s an LED backup. I am going back to sleep in my trailer. Knock if you need me, but do not wander away from the moth unless it is absolutely essential.”
The lanterns gave off a harsh white light and made a low hissing sound as they drank up fuel.
Green stood.
Green sat.
Green studied Valentina’s brass coffeepot. Her cup. The leaf pattern decorating the iron stove.
He ate a granola bar and poured himself cup after cup of plastic-flavored water from his jug. He relished the sweet fresh-air necessity of stepping out into the woods to pee.