Wolf Worm

In late April 1899, Sonia Wilson, a thirty-three-year-old scientific illustrator with less than a dollar to her name, arrives by train at Siler Station in rural Chatham County, North Carolina. She has been hired by Dr. Matthias Halder to illustrate his book on parasitic and carrion-eating insects. No one meets her at the station. The stationmaster arranges a ride with Asa Phelps, a gaunt local man who warns Sonia that "the Devil walks these woods" and claims to have seen the Devil, described as female, near a barren circle of ground called the Devil's Tramping Ground. Sonia privately dismisses the claim.

Sonia arrives after dark at Halder's decaying mansion and is greeted by Rose Kent, the Black housekeeper, who had no idea she was coming. Rose warns her that Halder will never marry her and describes him as equally cruel to everyone, which is why she stays: "There's worse people to work for, here in the South" (13). The next morning, Sonia meets Halder, a bespectacled, insect-like man who shows her a folio of existing illustrations so exquisite that Sonia realizes she cannot match them. He assigns her a light-filled studio still filled with the previous occupant's belongings. Rose deflects questions about who lived there.

Sonia settles into painting pinned specimens and teaching herself entomological terminology. She meets Jackson Kent, Rose's white husband and the household handyman, and Sally, a young maid. Halder locks all illustrations away and displays paranoid hostility toward the Megatherium Club, a naturalists' society he feels excluded from. Through the Kents, Sonia learns about mysterious killings from roughly a decade earlier: animals and people found drained of blood and hung in trees, their clothing disturbed as if by human hands. A group of men caught two young people in the woods draining a deer, staked the bodies, and buried them. The killings stopped.

Halder gives Sonia the previous illustrator's field sketches for reference. Working on the balcony, she catches a botfly, which Halder identifies as a Cuterebra, or "wolf worm," a parasite whose larvae burrow under mammalian skin and feed on the host's fluids. After Halder erupts in rage over a question about specimens, Sonia follows a light through the woods one night and discovers him entering a small windowless building with a padlocked metal door, descending stairs to speak to someone unseen. Phelps claims the building stores gunpowder, but Sonia recognizes the lie. She determines Halder is stealing Rose's chickens and taking them to the shed.

Sonia visits Hezekiah "Ma" Kersey, a Lumbee elder and midwife who confirms that Halder shot Saul Gregor, his wife Louisa's lover, and that Louisa escaped with help from local women. Ma Kersey describes "three-month babies" she once delivered: twins born with sealed eyelids and mouths full of needle-sharp teeth, children who seemed "like a whole 'nother sort of animal" (153). She connects these babies to the blood thieves killed near Bynum.

Meanwhile, Sonia discovers sketchbooks inscribed "Property of Louisa Halder" in the studio, confirming her predecessor was the doctor's wife. Jackson fills in the rest: Louisa endured fifteen years of marriage, fell in love with Saul, and tried to flee. Halder shot Saul, who told Louisa to run.

Events accelerate when a possum covered in warbles, the swollen lumps created by botfly larvae beneath the skin, attacks Sonia's balcony door at midnight, working the doorknob with uncanny dexterity. Halder dissects the dead animal and discovers larvae that bored through the skull into the brain, a phenomenon never recorded. He rushes to Raleigh to consult a specialist.

During his absence, Sonia notices Phelps leaving the shed without clicking the padlock shut. She enters that night and descends. Chained to a wire mesh table with iron manacles lies a man, his body desiccated and his fingernails grown to long claws. Clusters of warbles hang beneath the mesh. When she checks his pupils, one contracts in the candlelight: He is alive. A botfly-infected squirrel enters through a burrow and crawls onto his face; the man feeds on it while the animal offers no resistance. Sonia flees, already feverish. Ma Kersey nurses her through days of severe fever, and during recovery Sonia convinces herself the shed was a hallucination.

Phelps shatters this comfort. He confronts her with the candle she dropped, drags her back to the shed, and locks her inside, insisting the creature below is the Devil. Trapped, Sonia descends again. The body looks different now, gaunt with starvation rather than mummified. The man speaks. She recognizes his face from Louisa's sketches: He is Saul Gregor, whom everyone believes Halder killed.

Saul explains that he heals from virtually any wound. Halder recognized this and kept him as a living subject, repeatedly infesting him with screwworms (fly larvae whose spiral ridges anchor them in living flesh and make them nearly impossible to extract) and botflies and studying their effects on his regenerating flesh. The flies that fed on Saul changed, developing the ability to drive infected animals to offer themselves as food to keep their host alive. Sonia begins widening the burrow as an escape route.

When Phelps returns, Sonia sees a botfly larva boring into his skull, driving him toward Saul against his will. Quoting Scripture, Phelps stumbles forward. Saul screams in his face, and Sonia strikes the back of Phelps's head with an enamel pan, crushing the larva. Phelps falls onto the table, and Saul feeds on him, killing him.

Strengthened, Saul asks Sonia to free him. She uses forceps to extract nails Halder hammered through his limbs. Saul tears himself from the mesh, leaving most of the skin of his back behind. They push through the door into evening air, where Halder waits with a gun, having returned from Raleigh.

Halder views Saul as a parasite no different from his insects and tries to recruit Sonia by appealing to her scientific understanding. She pretends to agree, stepping away from Saul. When Halder glances at her, Saul lunges and bites the doctor's wrist, injecting anesthetic saliva that paralyzes him. Sonia takes the gun. She tells Saul she is too tired for moral judgment and will not stop him. He kills Halder.

Rose and Jackson arrive searching for Sonia. Rose recognizes Saul and lowers her weapon. The four construct a cover story: Halder kept a dangerous animal that escaped and killed him. The sheriff accepts the explanation.

Louisa Halder returns, summoned by Ma Kersey through a network of contacts. She reclaims the estate, reconnects with Saul, and asks Sonia to help find a reputable entomologist to publish Halder's research under a new name, with Louisa and Sonia credited as illustrators and Halder reduced to a footnote. Eleven months later, the book has been published, Louisa and Saul have married, and the Kents have left to start fresh nearby. The shed has been demolished, its underground room now a frog pond. Saul has hunted for animals carrying the mutated botflies and found none since winter, suggesting the population may have collapsed. Sonia remains in the house, working on a book of medicinal herbs with Ma Kersey, but she cannot walk the woods alone, checks her skin for lumps, and watches strangers' faces, aware that some thoughts "burrow into your mind as thoroughly as a wasp larva burrows into an unsuspecting caterpillar" (272).