“Over a year,” I said.
“About that, then,” said Saul Gregor.
“That’s not possible,” I said in a shaky voice. “You can’t have—no one could survive—”
“Believe me, I didn’t want to.” He gave me a wry look. “I’d beg you to kill me, if I thought it would take.”
I stared at him, not understanding the words, wondering if his mind had slipped. That happens to prisoners sometimes, doesn’t it? Who could blame him? Maybe it onlyseemedlike a year. Maybe…
The long nails floated by on the surface of the water, like little boats.
“Look, you can’t have been down here that long,” I said, hearing myself use the schoolteacher voice, as if I had caught one of the girls in an obvious lie. “You would have rickets.”
(I don’t know why my mind settled on rickets as the problem. In my defense, I was not at my best.)
Saul stared at me. I swept my eyes down his body, lookingfor signs of brittle bones, realized how ridiculous that was, and looked away. I’d forgotten he was nude. It hadn’t bothered me when he was an anonymous body, but now that he had a name, it seemed indecent.
“I probably do,” he said finally. “I’ve had everything else by now.”
Oh god, the man was lying on a bed of wires with botfly larvae dangling from his back, and I was lecturing him that he hadn’t suffered correctly. “I’m sorry,” I said, mortified. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“The screwworms were the worst,” he said, almost dreamily. “The botflies come out so easily, but the screwworms don’t. He practiced digging them out over and over, trying to get the trick of it.”
Halder had bragged about his monograph on the best way to remove screwworms. I pressed my hand over my mouth. It must have seemed like acentury. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Saul was quiet for so long that a fly landed on the side of his face. I picked up the pan and flung myself at the hole again, trying to drive out the mental image of the jar on Halder’s desk, the hundreds of screwworms packed together. Surely they could not all have come from Saul’s flesh. That wasn’t possible either.
Surely.
I hit a stone and began prying at it with my fingers, trying to tug it loose.
“How did you end up in Halder’s ill graces?” Saul asked abruptly.
“Too much curiosity.” Briefly I outlined how I’d come down and gotten caught.
“Ah. I am sorry to hear that… Miss… Wilson, was it?”
“Yes. Halder’s supposed to be coming back,” I added. “I suppose when he does, he’ll shoot me too.” I did not want to think about the alternative, that I might wind up on a wire rack of my own, my flesh colonized by maggots to appease a dreadful curiosity.
“Perhaps,” Saul said. “He stopped being interested in me a while ago, I think. I don’t know how long. I was hoping he might let me die.”
There was nothing I could say to that. A just god would not allow anyone to be trapped like this, but even an unjust one ought to strike me down if I uttered some platitude likewhere there’s life, there’s hopeto a man in Saul Gregor’s position.
I was spared the necessity of an answer when we both heard it. A scrabbling sound in the hole, coming down toward the room.
I stepped back quickly, skirt dragging through the water. Saul shuddered. “Whatever that is, Miss Wilson, I’d take it as a favor if you didn’t let it near me.”
It was a rabbit, and not a very large one at that. The Chatham rabbits would be embarrassed to claim kinship. It fell clumsily out of the hole, hit the water, splashed helplessly for a moment, then finally heaved itself up on the pile of bodies. With its fur plastered down, it looked smaller than the squirrel had. There was a single large warble under its left ear.
It made a jump for the table, couldn’t reach, and fell back. It lay as if stunned for a moment, then slowly dragged itself back to its feet.
“Please,” said Saul.
I will not be afraid of such a wretched creature. I willnot.
I grabbed a piece of burlap, wrapped it around my hand, and reached down to pick it up by the scruff of the neck. It weighed almost nothing.
The rabbit kicked feebly once, then dangled from my hand, panting. White showed all around its eye, though it didn’t seem to be focusing on me at all. I fancied I saw a ripple through the skin of the warble.
