I took a deep, steadying breath and let it out again, trying to organize my thoughts.
Right. Logic. I can do this.I had heard a creature that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before. What did that mean?
The most logical explanation was that I was wrong, of course.If you hear a horrible sound in the woods and you don’t know what it is, it’s probably a fox.(Another of my father’s pearls of wisdom.) So, yes. Probably I had simply startled, and been startled by, a fox.
And if it wasn’t?
Well, it wasn’t impossible that there was some creature down there unknown to science. Even in the enlightened age of 1899, we had not described everything that walked, crawled, swam, or flew beneath the sun. It was little more than a decade ago that a French priest had sent back the skin of the strange black-and-white bear from China, a beast entirely new to Western science. Such creatures existed.
But really, what were the odds that Halder was keeping a completely unknown species hidden away in a shed?
At least you know it’s not human. That’s worth something, isn’t it?
Strangely, it was. The idea of a prisoner had been horrifying, and I would have had to do something about it. You can’t just let people be kept in a hollowed-out hole in the ground. But doing something about it would have undoubtedly meant the end of my employment, and… well…
Fine. It’s petty and venal and you feel bad about it, but it’s still a relief that doing the right thing doesn’t mean getting fired.
I would have done the right thing though. I would have.
… I’m almost sure I would have.
The nasty little anxious voice in my head whispered that I was almost certainly a terrible person who would choose the security of a job over the suffering of another human being. I shoved it back down.I would not. Father would have disowned me.He had been an abolitionist, descended from Quakers, and even if his faith in the divine had been overshadowed by his faith in plants, those particular beliefs remained strong.
Iwouldhave stood up for what was right. It’s just that sometimes, it’s a relief not to have to.
A shriek went up behind me and I nearly bolted out of the room.
(it’s here it’s here it’s found you)
Then I recognized the sound of the kettle and laughed at myself. It came out as more of a croak, admittedly, but it still came out. I set the tea to steep, feeling foolish. If I was so nervous that a teakettle could practically send me into hysterics, I was clearly not what one would call a reliable observer.
Right. So there’s an animal in the shed, and Halder was feeding it. That’s all it was.
I wouldn’t particularly want to be kept in a dark room under a shed, but Halder was a biologist. Perhaps it was a nocturnal species or a burrowing one, and preferred the dark. And as for the secrecy…
You know that it’s got something to do with his parasite studies. You know it’s probably revolting.I thought of the jar of screwworm larvae and shuddered. Was he infecting some unfortunate host with live ones? Possible. Unpleasant, yes, and I couldn’t have done it myself, but… well… thousands of animals suffered screwworm infestations every year. It was an immense and intractable problem. Anything Halder could learn that might someday lead to a solution…
Regardless, I had my answer. I could stop chasing the doctor around the woods at night.
Thank the Lord for that.Just thinking about how close I had come to discovery made a shudder diffuse through my skin like ink in water.
When I dropped off the latest illustration the next day, I felt as if my guilt must be blazing like a brand across my face. Apparently it wasn’t though, or maybe Halder was feeling just as guilty, because he took my painting after no more than a cursory glance. I stepped out, feeling lightheaded, as if I’d gotten away with something.
A week went by, with no more missing chickens, and no more lights moving through the trees. Either the threat of being filled full of rock salt by his own hired man was sufficient to dissuade him completely, or Halder had moved on to some other avenue of… whatever it was he was doing. Mrs. Kent returned to her normal self, and, after Jackson returned with a cage full of squawk and feathers, breakfast also returned to normal.
I was still deeply confused about the whole thing, but as the days passed, my concerns… well, “faded” was the wrong word. I dug them out and turned them over so often that they began to fray at the edges, becoming part of the background anxiety of my life. I had gotten so good at tamping down anxious thoughts that these were just more of the same.
Probably he was feeding some kind of carrion-eating insects in the shed, and was so paranoid about someone stealing his research that he had resorted to outlandish secrecy. Probably I’d misheard most of what he said, and he’d just been talking to himself after all.
Probably it had just been a fox after all. Certainly there were plenty of them around, feeding on the world-famous Chatham rabbit. And yes, it had seemed to come from underground, but I had been nervous and jumpy and the hardest lesson a naturalisthas to learn is how desperately unreliable their own senses can be in the moment.
And even if neither of those things was true, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it anyway. I was hardly going to pick Halder’s pocket looking for the key. I didn’t know how to pick a lock, unlike the heroines in the Gothic books scattered around the studio, who all seemed to have childhoods that involved picking locks with hairpins. And I certainly wasn’t going to grab an axe from the woodshed and go try to hack the door down.
So I painted. I painted endless identical botflies, and when I had exhausted Halder’s collection of botflies, I painted the bone skipper fly,Thyreophora. Halder had a single specimen collected from Austria, before they went extinct. It was a strange little horror with a brilliant red-orange head, and while I hate to think of any species going extinct, I admit that I was much more broken up about the great auk than the bone skipper.
Most of my painting was done outside. Granted, it took a while after theCuterebraincident for me to be quite comfortable on the balcony again. But indoors was just as muggy and uncomfortable, and at least there was a slight breeze outside. After several days during which I encountered nothing more alarming than mosquitos and butterflies, I had relaxed.
Day followed day without much change. Sometimes it rained. This didn’t make things any less muggy. Jackson found a hornworm caterpillar with a line of white capsules clinging to its back, courtesy of a parasitic wasp of theIchneumonfamily. He gravely presented it to me, like a knight offering a sword, and I accepted it equally gravely.
