What of the flies?
“Don’t touch me,” whispered the human fodder beneath us.
The bandage removed by Warthrop had covered most of Varner’s right side. Beneath it was a wound roughly the size of pie plate, oval in shape, the edges of which were jagged and enflamed, a weeping cavity bored down to his ribs, which I could see glistening a storm-cloud gray in the flickering lamplight. Bloody pus dribbled over the hole’s lip and coursed down a crease formed by two rolls of belly fat toward the mildewed bottom sheet. Mrs. Bratton had not been able to strip it from the bed; Varner was too heavy for that.
Warthrop grunted, bringing his face to within inches of the wound, squinting into the recesses of the suppurating spot.
“No,” he murmured, with a shake of his head. “Not here… Ah! Yes, our good Mrs. Bratton missed a few. Do you see them, Will Henry? Look closely; see beneath the second rib there?”
I followed his finger to the spot where they squirmed and twisted in the organic muck of Varner’s violated torso: three maggots performing a sinuous ballet in the infected meat, their black heads shining like polished beads.
“Don’t… touch… me.”
“We are myopic in our perceptions, Will Henry,” breathed the doctor. “We populate our nightmares with the wrong carnivores. Consider it: The lowly maggot consumes more raw flesh than lions, tigers, and wolves combined. But what is this?”
He brushed past me to the foot of the bed. I had erred in thinking the captain was completely nude. He was not. He was wearing boots. The leather was cracked; the laces had deteriorated to bits of knotted string. The doctor gently pressed his finger into the swollen red skin directly above the boot on Verner’s right foot, and Varner responded with a hoarse cry of pain. Warthrop slid a hand between the heel and the mattress, and that single touch caused the captain to stiffen in agony.
“For the love of God, if there be any mercy in you, Warthrop…!”
“The foot is swollen, badly infected, so too the left, I suspect,” murmured the monstrumologist, ignoring his plea. “Bring the lamp closer, Will Henry. Stand there, at the foot of the bed. If I only had a sharp knife, I could cut it off.”
“Not my boots. Please not my boots!”
Warthrop grasped the decaying shoe with both hands and gave it a sharp yank. Were these the same boots that had saved his life twenty-three years before? I wondered. Had he lain there all that time, refusing to remove them, in superstitious dread? The muscles in the doctor’s neck went taut as he strained to pull the boot off. Varner began to weep uncontrollably. He cursed. He let loose with a string of blasphemies and invectives wrapped in heart-wrenching sobs.
The shoe broke apart in the doctor’s hands as it pulled free. The stink of decomposing flesh washed over us in an unwonted, nauseating wave. When the boot came off, the skin encased within came with it, sloughing off in a single, curdled mass, and thick, viscous pus the color of pond scum gushed onto the sheets.
Warthrop stepped back with an expression of disgust and dismay. “God damn them for this,” he said in a low and dangerous voice.
“Put it back on!” cried the captain. “It hurts. It hurts.”
“Too late,” muttered Warthrop.
He looked up into my tear-streaked face. “The infection has spread into his bones,” he whispered. “He has only hours, no more than a day.”
He dropped the shattered shoe upon the floor and returned to Varner’s side. With great tenderness he laid his hand upon the suffering man’s forehead and looked deeply into his eyes.
“Hezekiah, Hezekiah! It is very bad. I will do all I can, but-”
“There is only one thing I want,” whispered Varner.
“Tell me; I will do all within my power.”
With momentous effort, a triumph of human will over inhuman circumstance, the old man raised his head an inch off the pillow and whispered, “Kill me.”
The doctor did not answer. He remained silent for a moment, gently caressing the fevered brow, and then straightened slowly with the slightest of nods. He turned to me.
“Will Henry, wait for me outside.”
“Out-outside, sir?” I stuttered.
“If you spy her coming down the hall, knock twice upon the door.”
He turned back to the dying man, confident, as always, in my immediate obedience. He slid one hand beneath Varner’s head and with the other drew from beneath it the pillow. Without turning his head toward me, he said in a thick voice, “Do as I say, Will Henry.”
I set the lamp upon the floor, and the shadow thrown over the bed obscured the doctor’s face and the man over whom he hovered: a dark shroud for dark business. I left them frozen thus in that melancholy tableau, closing the door behind me, and I sucked the air of the hallway to the very bottom of my starved lungs, like a swimmer breaking the steely clutch of a tide most cruel. I pressed my back against the wall between Varner’s door and his neighbor’s and slowly slid down, wrapping my arms around my folded legs and pushing my wet face into my closed knees. There was a scratching sound behind the neighbor’s door, and the same guttural voice I had heard before spoke again, saying, “Hello again, little one. Are you back to see me? Don’t be shy. I know you’re there.” The person behind the door sniffed a horrid skin-crawling snuffle. “I can smell you. Come now, be a good child and open the door. We can play. I’ll be nice; I promise.”
I let go my knees and pressed my hands over my ears.
How long I huddled in that miserable hallway while the disembodied voice whispered and pleaded for me to open his door, I cannot say. I was comfortless, inconsolable, haunted by the memories of the maddening buzz and pop of the flies against the windowpane and the gurgling cry of Hezekiah Varner- Not my boots. Please not my boots! Time passes differently in places like the Motley Hill Sanatorium. Like during the ill-fated expedition of the Feronia, an hour there seemed longer than a day, and the nights longer than a year. What comfort could be taken in the surety that day follows night in a place such as that, when the day is composed of the same tedious routine, a purgatory of selfsame hours? What meaning has an hour when that hour is indistinguishable from any other? A new day dawns, another season comes and goes, a year passes and then another, and another, until twenty-three years have slipped into oblivion. Ah, Hezekiah, no wonder you remember your final voyage as if just yesterday you had thrown yourself upon the mercy of the briny deep! The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly’s wing in the stagnant air.