Chapter 6 Wake for the Rag Moth #3
There was a shaggy lawn of caterpillars on every surface save the hot stove and lanterns.
Each and every one of them inched and halted, reached and periscoped upward at the exact same pace and cadence, perfectly synchronized.
It gave the room a green strobing quality that was difficult to watch.
In the harsh white lantern light, a shifting text of shadows moved like an arcane alphabet across the walls.
Never had Green been more invested in keeping still. There was no way he could move without crushing a bratwurst-size caterpillar. It was intolerable. He was terrified to alter his position, yet lying prone in a sea of unknown organisms with unknown purposes made his amygdala scream.
He was vulnerable. His soft underbelly was laid out like a buffet. What if they were carnivorous?
He could hear a nature documentary voiceover in his head. A soft-spoken British voice offered commentary.
“The caterpillar’s only job is to feed.”
His imagination summoned a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, except instead of fruits and vegetables, the friendly illustrated insect ate one, two, three vital body parts.
He had to sit up. He was going to sit up. The only question was, how?
How hard could this be?
He moved his right arm into view. It was, mercifully, caterpillar-free.
Next he took that arm and began exploring the side of his body.
He had a slow-motion collision with one caterpillar.
His heart stopped. It rolled down his belly and landed on the cot with a barely audible plop.
Unperturbed, it didn’t miss a beat in rejoining its siblings’ inching dance.
Green exhaled.
Okay. That’s promising data.
He gently swept two more from his hip and another from the place on the cot he planned to plant his backside. With infuriating slowness, he tilted himself into a sitting position and set his feet on the floor.
A caterpillar climbed onto his lap.
A caterpillar swayed in the air on his left shoulder like a pirate’s parrot.
A caterpillar inched up the back of his head.
They were everywhere. Luminescent green. Alien. Moving as one to the tick of a silent clock.
Green reached a careful finger to feel the acorn bulge in his pocket. It was there. Promising whatever it was the acorn seemed to promise, speaking from a mental fogbank that bit him like a caustic chemical whenever he tried to touch it.
What have I signed up for?
Sitting up, he could once again see the surface of the table.
The rag moth corpse was a crumbling ruin of burlap scraps and heaped dust, but caterpillars were still streaming up and out of its center mass.
They were emerging from nothing. It was like a stage illusion.
The beautiful assistant was being sawed in half for an intended audience of nobody.
Even as he watched, the moth disintegrated more and more, collapsing inward, the dust rising to become a dark corona. It was as though every caterpillar that appeared removed one more stitch from the rag moth’s hold on existence.
If he hadn’t been so mortally terrified, he might have smiled. He had an answer for Valentina. He knew why rag moth corpses disappeared.
And all he had to do to report the good news was survive what he had learned. How many of those mummified corpses Valentina mentioned died with heads full of an interesting story?
He tried to estimate his chances of seeing morning and found he had little to go on.
The newts survived. Think like a newt. Be a newt.
Green knew as much about newts as he did Cyrillic.
On the plus side, only one plan made any sense at all. Stay stone-still. So far, that had been his course of action and he remained alive. The caterpillars were not the wolf. They didn’t seem interested in him at all.
Another data point.
Even so, nothing could stop every horrible hypothetical that Green’s imagination could cook up from testing the dials of his adrenal system.
Perhaps they all know I’m here and are preparing to swarm like piranhas…
…or like those beetles museums use to strip flesh from skeletons.
What did they call it with sharks? A feeding frenzy?
I’m probably thinking too simple. This is cryptonature.
They’re going to pluck me out of linear time and I’ll spend eternity watching worm dances.
Maybe they already have.
Maybe I wouldn’t know if I were experiencing eternity.
Maybe the Earth is a cinder and this moment has already stretched on to forever.
There are more of them every moment. Did I miss my chance to run?
Is this my last chance to run?
Valentina spoke from a memory.
“These are animals. Same as you or me. They are not demons or monsters.”
Yeah, but purely mundane animals can terrorize you. Can kill you.
The Valentina in his memory paused and frowned at his unspoken response.
“Mr. Green,” she said. “Are you focused on your own fanciful self-pity or are you watching the hitherto unobserved natural wonder unfolding around you?”
I’m watching! I can’t not watch! One of them is on my cheek!
Mental Valentina scowled.
“You are not watching, you are reacting. You are making this about you. Stop it. Imagine your body out of that room and leave your senses behind. What are they doing? You know full well the answer isn’t ‘trying to panic one random man.’ ”
Green growled internally.
How is someone I’ve known for ten hours living inside my head?
Imaginary or not, she had a point. The caterpillars weren’t treating him differently from the furniture. Maybe he could be furniture.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t immediate, but he pushed his ego down deep inside and tried to see the caterpillars outside the context of what they might do to him. With an immense effort of will, he stopped being the direct object of every caterpillar’s sentence.
Okay. What are they doing?
They all looked to be the exact same size, a bulky six or seven inches.
If there was variation among them, Green couldn’t see it.
He shifted his gaze to the caterpillar inching up his left biceps.
Its head was a dark mask of ovular eyes that appeared to meet in the center.
Looking closely, Green could see a hint of ocher between the green of the body and the black of the head.
Tiny translucent hairs ran the length of the animal and they pitched back and forth as the internal mechanism of locomotion contracted and expanded.
He was no entomologist, but he noticed what he could.
Focusing in on one caterpillar, thinking of it as a life-form and not a mishap, a creature who was shaped by the same natural pressures that shaped him, Green was once more surprised to find that he thought the animal was actually quite pretty.
Special. That thought stood out like a chandelier in a cornfield. It made no sense.
He looked up, studying the room.
Broadening his view, he took in the space as an impression of shape and movement. The synchronized motion of the caterpillars meant that they could be perceived as a whole, a unified creature with a single purpose. Each individual organism followed the same pattern.
Inch.
Inch.
Inch.
Pause in an arc like a tiny bridge.
Inch.
Inch.
Inch.
Curve upward in an S like a snake threatening to strike.
Wave like a reed in the wind.
Repeat the cycle.
There was something else about the motion that Green could see when he took a wider view.
The corpse of the rag moth formed a central point around which all the caterpillars were circling.
The dead moth was the hub of a wheel, the eye of a hurricane.
The moth’s body was gone. In its place was a pillar of churning dust with unusual cohesion.
It turned in the air like a column of muddy river water.
As he watched, he realized that the smell of the rag moth had become a taste, acrid and dry. It was more than a taste. His mouth felt parched and filmed with a month of uninterrupted sleep.
The dust roiled.
The caterpillars circled.
Green chewed at his tongue and tried to spur his salivary glands to action.
The pillar of dust flickered like a guttering flame and, for just a moment, the dark silhouette of a living rag moth fluttered above the table. Wind from huge moth’s wings tousled Green’s hair and grit stung his eyes.
Then it was gone.
There was a sound that wasn’t a sound. A sensation like air rushing into a vacuum, emotional rather than physical. And it was over.
The dust.
The moth.
The caterpillars.
Gone.
Green sat scrutinizing the place the moth had been. Where there had been a swirl of motion in all directions, now shadowed stillness. He didn’t know how they had all departed, so he couldn’t predict how or if they might return.
He carefully ran his hands over his shoulders and upper back. Nothing.
He stood, feeling the buzz of adrenaline in his joints.
Looking back at the cot, he had a flash of himself mummified, white teeth gleaming in his unhinged jaw, empty eye sockets staring at the vacant table.
There was nothing on the cot.
Nothing on his legs.
Nothing on the floor.
He turned in a slow circle, pushing through the fear and reacclimating to motion.
As the seconds ticked by and his mouth began tasting less like a tomb and more like a laundry hamper, the tension drained from his shoulders. As a rule, the human body tries not to prolong states of panic.
“Okay, then,” he said.
The sound of his voice planted a flag of control in the room.
“Okay.”
He exhaled a plume of dust, then coughed long and hard to clear his lungs. He spat a dark glob on the dirt floor.
The coughs rattled his exhausted body, but it felt good to be loud, to set aside the tense quiet that had hung over his head like a pickax.
Following the train of that thought, he began walking around the cabin, casting his approval on the walls and corners with their sensible lack of giant caterpillars. He noticed that the parasites Valentina had plucked from the moth were also gone, vanished from their glass vial prisons.
“Okay, then,” he said again, louder this time.
He grabbed some water and stepped outside.
It was still there.
The world. The woods. The autumn chill and the moonlight that turned all the trees graphite gray.
He rinsed his mouth and spit again and again before drinking.
He breathed deep of the cool mountain freshness and imagined a gentle rain washing him clean of fear.
He laughed and pumped a fist in the air.
It felt ridiculous and he didn’t care.
Even his nose and the cut on his chin felt better.
Something had changed.
He checked in on his devils. The wolf. The acorn. The feeling that his new world was a sinister joke at his expense.
Hey, assholes.
They were there, but they too were shifting. They were becoming less like a devouring fire and more like difficult terrain, the hard features of a landscape Green had begun to map. He found a place to stand and a guide to stand with him.
Maybe this isn’t about escaping something.
Maybe it’s about arriving somewhere.
He chuckled and wiped his eyes.
He felt silly with fatigue.
Valentina strolled back into his exhausted mind and communicated with a look.
Notes.
I need to make notes while it’s fresh in my mind. Also…I think I may pass out.
The moon was still high in the sky. He suspected this meant there was still a lot of night left to pass.
He went back to work.
Inside the cabin, it felt hot and stuffy after the cool night air. The feeling made Green’s eyelids heavy.
In his notebook, he filled two pages with short, simple sentences capturing every detail he recalled.
That done, he twisted the knobs to shut off both lanterns and fed a log to the stove. He watched a jack-o’-lantern smile of firelight from the iron door’s air vents color the wall. The smell of the earthen floor rose up like a lullaby in the warm dark and he surrendered to its comfort.
Near Green’s campsite, a great horned owl hooted her claim over her long-established territory.
On a mountainside six miles to the west, an ancient thing that had tasted Green’s blood chased prey it could not catch.
In the dream, Green was a quadruped taller than the trees on the mountainside. There was his campsite. His abandoned car beneath its tarp. The distant glow of Dancer’s office sign.
His triple-jointed legs were finger-thin and picked their way between branch and bough with the steady precision of a watchmaker.
He flowed over the forest. His body, a glass orb carrying moonlight like a dish of milk, was a pearl sliding along the autumn canopy. He was a thing of pure sight, his borrowed luminescence shining wherever he looked, shepherding the shadows from his path.
There was no question about his purpose. He searched for the horned wolf, for the dangerous secret that had told itself to him alone, unasked.
How could you search for a thing that had only been found once?
No. It hadn’t been found. It had shown itself.
Something white as magnesium fire darted below, like a spark arcing between the tree trunks. The glass fawn. Always fleeing. Always pursued. Between the trees. Between the worlds. Forests and fens. Oceans and continents. Our world and its native elsewhere space.
Green halted. The miniature moon of his body hovering above the steeple of a shaggy spruce.
There is the prey.
Where is the predator?
The fawn leapt and darted away, a cape of tree shadows following behind it like a bridal train.
A motion nearby pulled Green’s focus.
There, seated on a soft patch of nothing, the horned wolf regarded him from behind a mask of dry bone.
Predator and prey? thought the wolf. What do you know of such things, not-man?
Green turned his luminescence to the wolf and found that the wolf extinguished as much light as he could summon.
The creature remained a dim ivory mask with a mane of starless night.
The wolf, in turn, pressed its shadow on Green and a thick velvet curtain fell across his senses.
Grow, the wolf said in the dark. Grow to honor the world that made you.
Green squirmed on his cot, blinking at the firelight glow on an unfamiliar ceiling.
He tried to bring back the treetops and the moonlight, concentrating until his breath caught in his throat, but they were gone.
There was only night and smothering heat.
He slept again without dreaming.