He’d brushed the horrible slugs off a small area on her side. I forced myself to look and saw smooth, shiny, iridescent skin. The skin appeared to move in a regular rhythm. “She’s breathing?”
He was opening his pack to find a stethoscope. I couldn’t wait.
“My God, they are eating her alive!” I started scraping the maggots away with my shovel, then worried I’d hurt Mama worse, so I used my hands. I was so desperate, I didn’t remember to put on the gloves.
As soon as my bare hands touched an inch of her bare skin, I felt it. Not her heartbeat, but that warmth, that fellowship I shared with the beetles, like being enveloped in a smile.
“Mama?” I whispered.
The skin beneath my hand pulsed in rainbow colors. The smile grew.
“It’s me, Willow,” I whispered out loud while I tried to project an image of a willow tree, to identify myself. I was the Visualizer, wasn’t I?
A picture of the tree covered in the lightning bugs in my backyard flashed through my head. I hadn’t put it there.
I replaced that mental picture with one of a flame-lit dolphinlike being with wings.
Yes, I thought I heard in my head. And “Yes,” I shouted back, with a quieter, internal yes for good measure. We were communicating! Who needed a translator? I knew I didn’t have that power. Mama had enough magic for both of us.
“Hurry, Matt, get them off her!” I used both hands to swipe the disgusting worms away. I did not acknowledge his look of disbelief and dismay that I had just introduced myself to a near-dead aberration.
“We cannot save her.”
“Yes, we can,” I cried, frantically clearing a wider swathe of skin. “It’s these leeches that are killing her.”
No. The children of light free us to live.
I stopped and sat back on my heels. I didn’t need any mental image to understand that the maggots ate through sloughing layers of necrotic blubber to uncover the healthy prismatic skin beneath. I could see it with my own eyes.
Matt was staring at the stethoscope in his hands, shaking his head. “This is not right.”
Maybe it was. “Matt, talk to me about maggots.”
“They are the larval stage of many different insects. Forensic detection uses them to determine time of death by identifying the particular species. Modern medicine has adopted them for caring for wounds. They eat dead tissue, but leave the healthy. They’re voracious, because they need to go into the next stage where they do not eat, but change into the finished product. Metamorphosis, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.”
The concept took a lot of mind-twisting. These disgusting parasites turning into anything as lovely as the Lucifers? “So the maggots are eating dead skin, but leaving the healthy underneath. Then they’ll be reborn as beetles, and she’ll emerge as . . . whatever.”
“Dolphins are mammals, with live births. Most fish and all birds lay eggs that hatch into tiny replicas of the parents. No larva or pupae or cocoon. No stages, except ones like tadpoles. Only growth to maturity. This is no insect, amphibian, or bird.”
Mama was no dolphin, either. But mother to the beetles?
I felt the humor deep in my veins, with a glow of warmth. Mama was an empath extraordinary. And she knew my language, the same wondrous way the elf king and the white stallion had.
Not mother. Male.
Huh?
She showed me a picture of Matt, then one of Piet, which confirmed for me that Mama and the fireflies also communicated with each other, unless they shared a hive mentality. Either way, they all knew what any one of them knew. “Men?”
Matt looked at me. I forgot to say it to myself.
His curiosity had to wait. I thought I understood what Mama—whatever gender he was—meant. “So you are not the mother of the fireflies, but the host? You have a symbiotic relation? The maggots help you shed or molt or whatever it is that you do, and you nurture the babies?”
The concept was there, not the words. I thought about pulling out my sketch pad and drawing little remora eels suctioned to sharks, cleaning the much larger fish. But I didn’t know where the creature’s eyes were, under the decomposing flesh, or if he could see. Instead I drew a mental image of a maggot turning into a beautiful shimmery lightning bug. May that be the first and last time I sketched a maggot, on paper or on my brain.
I felt another warm smile in my soul. And envisioned that insect-fish leaping and playing and diving away. M’ma.
M’ma, that’s your name?
Part.
My mind couldn’t put together the string of words, symbols, and feelings that comprised the rest of his name. I moved on, doing my best to project my thoughts his way. But you can’t leave until you’re all clean?
He considered the maggots as cherished offspring, judging by the image I received of me holding Elladaire. And the children are transformed, too? I guessed. He did not refute my theory, so I asked, M’ma, when will you all be ready?
Soon.
You will be beautiful.
He understood that. You are beautiful.
No, I was nuts. I could tell by the look on Matt’s face.
I wasn’t ready to pretend to act normally for him. I needed to know what I could do for M’ma right now. “Water, shade, food?”
Matt asked for water. I ignored him, listening for the voice in my head.
We rest.
“We? There are more of you?’
Rest, Willow. Rest.
“But how will you get out of here?”
“The same way we got in,” Matt answered.
“Hush, I’m not talking to you.” I visualized the blocked ditch, the mounded dirt and high grasses. How can you escape from here?
A cheerful warmth washed over me again. M’ma echoed Matt: The same way we got in.
“Is it safe here?”
Matt grabbed his shovel and spun around, looking for danger. I kept forgetting not to talk out loud, but saying the words made it easier for me to set them clearly in my mind. I pictured a horde of hungry rats gnawing and raucous crows pecking at the decomposing flesh.
In answer scores of beetles rose up from the nearby grasses, ready to do fiery battle.
M’ma sent a message: Safe for now. Matt’s eyes were huge, but he didn’t start swinging his shovel at the fireflies, thank goodness. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Rest.
“Nothing for awhile,” I told Matt, convincing myself. “We can’t hurry the process.” There were tons of blubber left to get through, then the maggots had to build cocoons or whatever they did before turning into full-sized lantern beetles. I couldn’t think about what came later, which might be less safe.
Matt wanted to do something, anything. He was not used to standing around when an animal was suffering.
“It’s all right,” I told him. “He doesn’t need anything at this moment.”
“He? I thought you called it ‘Mama.’”
“M’ma. It’s an ancient name for an older god,” I prevaricated. I wasn’t a storyteller for nothing.
“I never heard of such a name or god or creature.”
“It’s very rare.”
“I bet. And I’m thinking this is some kind of intricate prank you and your friends put together to feed that prick Barry so he’d look like a fool trying to peddle a hoax. I don’t appreciate being caught in the middle.”
He looked hot and bothered and ready to march out of the vicinity. “It’s not a hoax. Listen, I trusted you. You have to trust me now.”
“By doing nothing?”
“No, by digging. We have to camouflage the ditch opening better to keep away the worst predators, the Barry Jensens of this world.”
Still angry, he started to gather our belongings and stuff them in the backpacks. I took a last look at M’ma and saw the smooth patches we’d uncovered were already barely visible under a fresh blanket of maggots. There must be thousands of the disgusting white worms. 3,549 of them, according to the numerologists in
Paumanok Harbor.
Which meant 3,549 new fire-starters.
Heaven help us.
CHAPTER 31
WE HAD TO HURRY, with the officials on the way to inspect the air and the water and the insects. Damn Martin Armbruster and his big mouth and big ambitions. If I could have used my cell phone from here, I’d see if Elgin could get the usual onshore breeze blowing backward. If Elgin and the other weather magis could get wind coming across the grasses, they could blow the stench out to sea so M’ma’d be harder to find. With miles to search, and Piet to extinguish the lightning bugs, there’d be little enough to see.
The phone didn’t work, Elgin couldn’t come, Piet was out of town, and hardly a blade of grass moved in the still air. So we had to hide our find better, faster.
“Grab the shovel. It’s heigh-ho time again, Doc.”
Matt seemed to accept that I was in charge, a miracle in a man, in my experience. He took a different path back toward the beach, rather than make our route twice as easy to follow. “I’ll be Doc if you’ll be Sexy.”
“Sexy isn’t one of the seven dwarves.”
“That’s why they needed Sleeping Beauty so badly.”
I knew he was teasing to get my mind off the sight and the desperation. “I wish I were asleep and this was all a bad dream.”
“Would you rather be Scary?”
“No one’s afraid of me. I feel more like Scaredy. As in scaredy cat.”
He looked back, but kept going in the right direction, trying to step on drier ground when possible, not leaving footprints. “You’re kidding. You scare the hell out of me. I’ve never known a woman—or a man, for that matter—who can do what you do.”
“What, throw up without getting my shoes dirty or talk to bugs and beached whales?”
“No, someone who can face the totally unknown and figure it out.”
“I did, didn’t I?” And without the hotshots from DUE. “You were pretty great yourself, accepting whatever you saw without asking too many questions. But tell me, what did you see?”
He stopped walking to adjust his backpack. “Seriously? You were right there looking at the same thing.”
I took the opportunity to have a sip of water to make my interest seem more casual. “I know, but I’d like to hear your impression of what we found back there. Part of your job is figuring what’s wrong when your patient can’t tell you, by observation.”
Matt described a sadly deformed animal—fish or sea mammal—he thought, with inches of dead flesh sloughing off. Instead of the bone and tissue he expected under the rotting layer, he’d discovered smooth, shiny, firm gray skin, which made no sense in a dying animal. When he listened for a heartbeat, he heard something entirely new to him. Maybe two hearts beating. Maybe an echo from the thousands of maggots, or noise from the nearby lightning bugs. Maybe he’d been listening to another organ entirely. “It was more of a concerto than a glub-glub,” he said. “Nothing that could keep a creature from expiring. I wish I could have recorded it, or hooked up an EKG. We never did see or hear any breath signs. Without a more extensive examination, I’d have to assume the animal was in its last hours, at best.”
I did not want him turning into Martin of the science experiments. “What about the maggots? What did you think of them?”
“They appeared to be hard workers. Big, white, fat.”
“And the beetles?”
“Big, brown, not very impressive, except for a little incandescence in their abdomens. I suppose it shows more brightly in the dark.”
I brushed one off my shoulder and willed it back to M’ma before Matt got a better look. But maybe what he saw was all he could ever see, by the laws of the otherworld. Poor Matt did not know what he was missing. For a rare time I was glad I could see the remarkable visitors in their true appearance.
“What was your take on all the creatures?” he wanted to know.
“Just a little bit different.” Like the difference between an old black-and-white movie and Avatar in 3-D. I’d bet the grubs were a blanket of glowworms at night. Even by daylight, the lantern beetles gleamed like prisms. Their outer wings shone gold, while the inner gossamer wings flashed green lace. What Matt called a little incandescence I saw as a tiny flame carried safe in a mica-like transparent belly. And M’ma, under the cover of the cleaners, reflected the sky and the grasses and the sun like stained glass. After his transforming molt he’d be breathtaking, and very much alive.
If we kept him safe long enough.
Matt believed me when I said we had to hide the scene in the ditch, without understanding how serious a problem it was, of course. His reasons were different from mine.
He knew a hundred scientists could be here by morning, doing biopsies and gathering specimens and slides. They couldn’t help the dying animal but could add to the poor creature’s suffering. “I’d suggest we call in the marine rescue people from Riverhead, but they’d be too late. I doubt it could swim in that condition even if they managed to open the ditch to the bay. It couldn’t survive transport to their facility. They’d have no idea how to euthanize it, either, besides needing permission from the endangered species people.”
“Euthanize? He’ll be fine.”
“Fine, with its flesh falling off, out of the water, not breathing that I could see, smelling as if its insides were rotting too?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Because M’ma told me? Because beings from Unity might be eternal? “Because we are going to make certain no one bothers them until they are strong enough to take care of themselves.”
“Them? You are worried about the maggots and the beetles as well as the deformed, dying dolphinoid?”
“They are all together.” One life, One heart, like my pendant said, even if they didn’t have the same kind of hearts we did. “They need each other.”
“Okay, I can see that. That’s how symbiosis works. Except sometimes it’s a fine line between cannibalism and partnership.”
Even though Matt wasn’t convinced, he started shoveling dirt while I gathered seaweed and driftwood to pile in front of where the ditch opening should be. We found a thick tree trunk—silver with sun and saltwater—to pull on top of the pile. Then we scattered sand and loose dirt to cover our footprints as best we could. We had to trust the incoming tide to cover some of our boat’s skid marks, and pray no one did a flyover.
When we were done, Matt lifted me into the narrow outboard without asking. I might have taken offense at being manhandled, but it felt good, especially when my chest rubbed against his as he set me down and I inhaled his scent of sweat and swamp and something spicy. My nipples hardened, and not from the cool breeze kicking up.
Whoa. This was not the time, the place, nor the man to be stirring senses that had no business feeling anything but worry about M’ma. Matt’s quick intake of breath told me he’d felt that touch, that stirring too, which made me think about whether he was attracted to me or not. Which mightn’t help M’ma and the luminaries any, but did get my mind off the dark, choppy waves keeping the boat jittering and jouncing. Then I remembered what Piet said about sex and adrenaline, how danger made men horny. I still didn’t think it worked for women. Most females I knew wanted to curl up after a crisis, not curl into a hard, naked, aroused body. Besides, there was no danger to me or Matt. Did nausea count? Dread? How about the euphoria of actually communicating with an alien being?
No matter, the thought of Piet brushed aside any lustful notions. So did those waves. I couldn’t get sick; my stomach was empty. But I could panic at how many people I spotted out on Rick’s boat and the Bay Constable’s. The Coast Guard cutter from Montauk cruised by, too.
Sexy feelings, when we had to sink an armada? No way.
Piet was furious I’d gone searching without him. I wanted to think he was jealous, and he was, but not of Matt. I got to see Mama and he didn’t. I’d seen more of the forbidden otherworld beings than anyone since Unity and our
Earth were connected—and he’d never seen one. My reminder that the fireflies were not of our universe did not appease him.
“They’re bugs. I can see bugs any time I want. Granted not ones that start fires, but they are still bugs. Furthermore, your actions were dangerous and irresponsible, showing an Other to a nonsensitive.”
“You had your own duties and I could not wait. I thought Matt’s veterinary knowledge could come in handy. Besides, he is a good man who considers Paumanok Harbor his home. He wants to help keep it safe. Most of all, he has no idea he is seeing magical, mystical creatures with incredible powers.”
Piet scowled and rubbed at the scar on his jaw. He didn’t think I was brave or clever or super-gifted to hear M’ma in my mind, which aggravated me. I knew the gift was M’ma’s, not mine, but he chose me, didn’t he? I changed the subject.
“Did you find Roy? What about the fire at the camp?”
He told me they’d never seen Roy, but the fire looked like insect-assisted arson, not that the East Hampton fire police had an inkling of that. The last was said with a drop of sarcasm; he wouldn’t point out an aberrant creature to an ordinary person.
There’d been no electric wires to short out, no lightning, no accelerants. They did find a cigarette butt and sent it away for fingerprint and possible DNA matching. That took time, though, so they couldn’t immediately prove Roy had anything to do with the blaze. They had a manhunt going for him anyway.
And Barry had shown up there, flashing a press pass and claiming freedom of information. The police kept him behind the yellow tape. He’d come along with Martin and Ellen and scores of other ambulance chasers and fire fanatics. He tried to shout out rumors that weird insects were involved. Some of the spectators laughed.
“You said the beetles were involved.”
He took two out of his shirt pocket. Alive.
For a minute I thought how foolish he’d been to carry them close to his skin, until I remembered how he had nothing to worry about from these two. They couldn’t ignite anything in Piet’s presence. And their kind weren’t easy for ordinary people to see with their fires out, thank goodness.
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