Say that your wife was about to run away with someone, and you caught them. You shot him and crammed his body into the shed you had once kept animals in, expecting him to die, but instead he healed, and you realized that he was one of these others.
Say that you realized this was the solution to your problem. A subject that would not die, no matter how many holes you put in him, digging screwworms out of his flesh. No matter how many botflies lived beneath his skin. An endless source of material for your studies… assuming that you were willing to commit atrocities that no one should inflict on another living being.
Say that you hated him enough to do it anyway.
“Ithasbeen a year then, hasn’t it?” It sounded like my voice, but it must not have been me talking, because whoever it was sounded very calm. I was certainly not calm.
“Yes,” said Saul.
“And no rickets,” said that calm voice, somewhere off in the distance.
“And no rickets,” Saul said, as if rickets mattered at all, but if I focused on something very small, perhaps I would be able to survive the next few minutes after all.
“Did Louisa know?” It was suddenly very important to me that she had known. If she had, and had loved him anyway… well, I would trust the judgment of a woman who could paint beetles more beautifully than anyone I had ever known.
If she hadn’t—if Saul had lied to her—then I did not know what I was going to do next.
“She knew,” Saul said. I met his eyes and there was no trace of a lie in them.
“He’s a devil!” Phelps shouted, and I jumped. Strange as it sounds, I had, for an instant, forgotten that there was a man with a gun in the room. “He’s a tempter! Don’t listen to him!”
I glanced back at Saul, filthy and gaunt, chained down on his bed of pain. A tempter? Only if pity was a temptation.
“Mr. Phelps…” I began, with no idea how to finish that sentence.
Phelps opened his mouth. At first I thought he was about tospeak, but then I saw that he was panting. He scratched at his scalp and winced, pulling his hand away. I thought there might be blood on it, but the light wasn’t good enough to be sure. “Lord have mercy, it hurts,” he said, almost to himself.
“Let me help you,” I said.
He shook his head miserably. “No one can help me,” he said, taking another step forward. “‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’”
“It’s driving you now, isn’t it?” asked Saul, almost conversationally. “It wants you to come closer, doesn’t it?”
Phelps nodded his head up and down, quick and jerky. He grabbed for the timbers beside the stairs and clung, one-handed, half turning. I caught a glimpse of the back of his head.
His scalp was raw and bloody, scored with scratches, and the lump in the middle was crowned with a dark larval circle.
Not a goose egg after all.
I felt no surprise. Either I was numb, or, far more likely, I’d suspected all along but hadn’t let myself think of it. I wondered how far the larva had dug into his brain. It was low on his skull, close to the brain stem. Perhaps it was a miracle he wasn’t paralyzed.
No, no. The wolf worm needs them to be able to walk. It wouldn’t chew through anything vital. Like the wasp larvae in the caterpillar, it keeps its host alive as long as possible so that it can continue to feed.
“Phelps,” I said. “Phelps, it’s just an insect. I watched Halder dissect a possum that had one. I saw what he did. I can get yours out.” (This was a staggering lie, of course, but if I could just get the gun away from him and get him out of the shed, I could get him to Ma Kersey and maybe we could dosomething.)
His fingers jerked, releasing the timber, and he stumbled forward.
“I think it’s too late, Miss Wilson,” said Saul.
“It takes two weeks for them to reach maturity,” I argued,as Phelps blundered across the floor. “It’s only been a couple of days for him.”
“The ordinary ones, perhaps. But things like us can grow very quickly indeed.”
If a creature like Saul could gestate in human flesh in three months, why should a botfly be any different? What changes had been wrought on the evolution of these insects, down in this dark hollow in the clay?
“Devils,” wept Phelps. He hit the wooden table and fell heavily against it, gasping for breath. “Samson,” he added nonsensically. “Samson.”
If I were braver, perhaps I might have tried to snatch the gun away from him. I didn’t. God knows where the bullet would have ended up, in these close quarters. “Let me help you,” I said again.
