I pulled one sleeve protectively down over my hand, steeled myself, and waved away the flies on the man’s face. Most of them buzzed up angrily, bumping against the fabric of my gown. One blundered into the protective mesh in front of my face and clung there, a blurry shadow too close to bring into focus. I batted it away, heard myself moan, and thought,Stop that. Whimpering won’t help.
Then I thought,Oh shut up, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, whimper if it makes you feel better.
One fly remained, crawling sluggishly across the man’s upper lip. I lifted my arm to bat at it again, realized that it might try to escape up his nostrils, and whimpered again without guilt.
Then I set a fabric-covered finger against his eyelid and pulled it back.
For a moment, I stared into a dark hole of pupil, and then it contracted down to a pinprick in the light of the candle.
I jumped back. The candle flame went out and I knew that I had to light a match and get it going again, but even doing that much seemed, momentarily, impossible. I leaned against the wooden table in the dark, overwhelmed.
He’s alive.
He’s still alive.
I hadn’t failed him—but now I had to get both of us out of here.
How long had the man been here?
How long does it take for someone’s fingernails to grow like that?
I shook my head in the dark. No.Thatwas impossible. It would take years and no human could survive for years like that.The length of time hardly mattered though. To do this to someone for even five minutes would be monstrous.
Halder has been feedinghim, not the insects. Except that the insects are feedingonhim, so…
I blundered away, hearing the boards squelch under my feet. I had to sit down for a minute and get myself together. When I found the stairs, I climbed up and sat, still clutching the warm candle in nerveless fingers.
My great interest, Miss Wilson, is in parasitic and necrophagic species.
It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them.
But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.
Study them he had, in his own back garden. I had pictured cages of animals infected with botfly larvae and recoiled, but it had never occurred to me that Halder might have used ahumanmodel.
But why?Whywould you do that? It’s so dangerous and forwhat?Why would anyone risk getting caught just to use a human?
And then something that had been slowly growing on my consciousness finally intruded, and I realized that while I was sitting there, the blackness had become more of a deep, deep gray and I could make out the edges of the table in front of me.
My eyes couldn’t possibly have adjusted. This was the kind of pitch blackness that you found in deep caves. And yet there was light coming from somewhere, the smallest hint of it, somewhere near the back, against one wall. I could just barely see the edge of a sheet of burlap, a square of black against the faintest edge of illumination.
My heart leapt. Could there be another way out? A door hidden behind the wall? An escape?
Something scrabbled on the far side of the room. I saw movement and heard a muffled thump, followed by a splash.
I shot to my feet, and at that moment, the man said, in a painful rasp, “Please… no…don’t let them…!”
Another scrabbling sound. My brain was full of the possum trying to get through my bedroom door, the possum that had a botfly in its brainoh mother of God, I’d almost forgotten about those. Except that I could get away, even if only to the top of the stairs, and the man chained to the table couldn’t.
Cold determination settled on me, like a glaze of winter frost. I hadn’t saved the dying man when I might have, so whatever happened to him now was my fault.So do something about it.
My hands didn’t shake as I struck one of my few remaining matches. Part of me was screaming with terror and wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and weep, but I didn’t have time for that now. I locked her away in a shed of her own and lit the candle.
Did I have anything that could be used as a weapon? My boots might serve if nothing else did. I swept my gaze over the room and spotted the enamel pan. Not heavy, but better than nothing. I picked it up, waiting.
With a scratch of claws, the intruder leapt up onto the man’s prison bed. The wavering candle light revealed… a squirrel?
Gray fur, long brushy tail. Unmistakably a squirrel. It turned its head slightly, light glinting off one dark eye, and I saw the back of its head was strangely distorted, much too long. I didn’t even need to see the dark circle of a botfly to know what had happened. It made a perverse sort of sense.Cuterebra emasculator. Squirrel botfly.
