“Shut up,” I hissed to Saul. And to Phelps, more loudly, “You were telling me about the pigs, Mr. Phelps?”
“Oh, aye.” He shook himself. “That fourth pig wasn’t dead. It was sat half in her lap and she was tearing chunks out of its face andit let her do it.”
I was suddenly horribly conscious of the pile of dead animals who had let themselves be gutted.Keep him talking.“That must have been very… ah… unsettling.”
“Yes, Miss Wilson, it was.” With anyone else, I might have suspected sarcasm, but Phelps sounded earnest. “I didn’t know about the devils then. I shot her.”
My eyes dropped down to the gun again. I had been hoping that Phelps had a philosophical objection to shooting women, but apparently I was being thwarted at every turn today.
He gestured with the gun. “Would have been a lot of questions. People would have seen a dead girl and not what she was doing. I was a different person then. I’m not proud of what I did, but I dumped the body in the woods, as far away as I could take her, and hoped nobody’d come looking. And nobody did.”
I had one unbroken nail left after digging. I felt it break against the metal pan and looked down, bemused, at my own white fingers, as if they belonged to someone else. “Ah,” I said.
Phelps’s gaze was unfocused. I don’t think he was even seeing me anymore, though he’d probably focus quick enough if I moved. “When word came down they’d cornered the devilswho did for all those people, I grabbed my gun and went out. And there she was. Exactly the same.”
Things were slotting into place in my head that I didn’t like, all of them just as impossible as Saul having been locked down here for more than a year. Nevertheless, I wasn’t ready to completely abandon reason yet. “It may have simply been a family resemblance or—”
“She recognized me too. Asked if I was gonna shoot her again.”
“You must have been mistaken about—”
“She left half her guts on the floor of my hogpen.”
I stopped talking.
“Hope you didn’t let any of the hogs eatthat,” said Saul, with a clicking chuckle.
Phelps had hunched over as he spoke, but now he stood up straight, unfolding himself like a praying mantis. I took a hasty step back and felt my back bang into Saul’s table. Something landed on the back of my neck and I had a horrible feeling that it was a botfly.
“I told ’em,” Phelps said. “I told ’em that a bullet wasn’t enough. I told ’em those two were devils. They didn’t want to listen, but the preacher finally did. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Ma Kersey’s description of the dead girl eating clay beat against my brain like a fly trapped in a cup. I lifted my hand, trying not to make any movements that might startle Phelps, and slapped at the back of my neck. Wings brushed my hand and I shuddered.
“Mr. Phelps,” I said, desperate to keep him talking, “perhaps you’re right. Perhaps that girl had… had a condition unknown to science. But it does not follow—”
(thin bones crunching under Saul’s teeth)
“—that Mr. Gregor has it as well.”
“Miss Wilson,” Phelps said wearily, as if I were a particularly slow pupil, “I watched the doctor put two bullets in him. Onein the knee and one in the back. Both of ’em came out the other side. Look at him now. Do you see any scars?”
I blinked foolishly then turned around, my eyes sweeping over Saul’s prone body. His knees both looked like perfectly ordinary knees. I hastily averted my eyes from his groin, but his belly and ribs were smooth and unmarked by anything but the dark bodies of resting flies.
He must have been mistaken. There’d be enormous scars. He’d never walk again.
Halder missed. Or this isn’t the same man. Or…
My gaze continued, inexorably, up to Saul Gregor’s face. He met my eyes and his lips twisted in a small, rueful smile. Then he nodded.
“Really?” I said weakly.
“I could have gotten away if it wasn’t for the knee,” Saul said. “We heal very fast, but even our kind can’t run on a shattered joint.”
Oh.
Say that you were a scientist who studied parasites. There is only so much that you can observe from dead specimens. You need to watch their process through living flesh. But host animals are small and often hard to keep alive, particularly if you wish them to be infested over and over. How often can you pull a screwworm out of a rabbit before it dies of massive infection?
Say that you learned about another kind of human. One who heals at an astonishing rate. One that feeds on blood and viscera and who can endure astonishing hardships.
