Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) (31 page)

We'd hiked about a half mile along the drainage ditch that couldn't drain anything from either side, landward or seaward, it was so congested with weeds and mud and muck. And scorched bones.

Matt had stopped humming. He'd held the shovel in front of him like a weapon. I got a firmer grip on my hammer.

The ditch grew muddier, wetter, and its banks more intact the farther we walked away from the shore. It was about five feet wide, jumpable, but easy enough to wade across with only a trickle of murky water at its base.

Then we'd seen what had the canal blocked from both sides. Not another cave-in or clogged vegetation, but a huge lump, maybe fifteen feet long, and filling the entire width of the ditch, like a cork in a bottle.

“What the—” Matt stopped so short I bumped into him. “It looks like a dead dolphin or maybe a juvenile whale. How the hell did it beach itself so far from the water?”

I went around him, got a closer look, and lost my confidence along with my lunch. How was I supposed to tell the luminaries it was too late, I couldn't help them? How was I supposed to get rid of them? How could I explain to Matt?

I hoped he couldn't see the extra appendages, the odd large-headed shape, just a dead animal covered in flesh-eaters, surrounded by incinerated scavengers. I guess the lightning bugs had tried to protect her. They'd failed, the same way I failed her.

Matt walked around the rotting corpse while I rinsed my mouth out with the water from my backpack. He asked if I had any idea what this was, or had been.

Without thinking, I answered: “It's Mama.”

“That poor creature is not mother to anything I've ever seen.”

I didn't see how she could be the mother to the beetles, either, but this was definitely the figure they'd tried to show me, up in lights. She'd never go sailing in the sky again.

At least the tears kept me from seeing the destruction of a glorious being who'd died for the crime of trespassing into our world.

Matt knelt beside the body. I couldn't look. Instead I tried to judge how far we were from any road, and how we were going to get more people and equipment out here to bury her without alerting the media and attracting sightseers.

“Come look at this, Willow. I think she's alive.”

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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? There are more of you?'

“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?”

“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

W
E 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.”