What Moves the Dead (32)
“Possible,” Denton was saying. “It’s possible. I would not have thought it, but no doctor worth his salt will ever say that he’s seen everything there is to see. But I don’t see how we can prove it. The shroud may have been moldy, after all.”
“An autopsy on Maddy’s body would show it,” I said shortly.
“A body that you tell me we don’t have. And I am certainly not going to slice open Roderick’s skin looking for these hyphae!”
I gritted my teeth. “Then it’ll have to be a hare. And this time I won’t miss.”
* * *
It was Angus who provided the hare. I had swallowed my pride and gone to him to ask for his help. “Not for eating, I won’t!” he said, but when I explained that it was going to be dissected, he put his head to one side and said, “How fresh do you be needin’ it?”
“Eh?”
“There’s one not a hundred feet from t’end of the causeway. Fell in the lake, by the look of it. Saw it on my way back from the village this morning.”
We tromped out to find it. Sure enough, there one was, lying half-in, half-out of the water, facedown. It looked as if it had simply wandered up to the tarn and fallen asleep.
I was wearing my riding gloves, but I went back for a long stick from the woodpile, and fished it out without touching the water. Angus raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t comment.
There were four of us assembled around the breakfast table this time, although what was laid out was substantially less appetizing. The light was the best in the house, and that was all that we could hope for. We had brought in lamps and candles from our rooms and crowded them along the table until the table was drowning in light. Denton had fetched his doctor’s bag and opened it, a black leather mouth gleaming with scalpel teeth.
“Miss Potter,” said Angus, touching his cap. “’Tis a pleasure to see you again.”
Miss Potter actually went a little pink. “Mr. Angus. I didn’t think I’d see you so soon.”
“You two met, then?” Come to think of it, Angus hadn’t been complaining about the lack of occupation lately, but I had been too distracted to pay attention.
“Oh yes. Mr. Angus was kind enough to hold my umbrella at just the right angle the other day while I painted a particularly fine Amanita phalloides.”
I was trying to come up with a joke about phalloides that would not end with Miss Potter hitting me with her umbrella when Denton cleared his throat and called us back to reality. “I am making the first incision,” he said.
“Wait!” Miss Potter looked around the room, found a stack of linen napkins, and hastily handed them around. “Cover your mouth and nose. If there are spores, and this is indeed a dangerous fungus, we do not wish to inhale them.”
I knotted the napkin around my head. Denton muttered something about feeling like he was about to rob a stagecoach, then took up the scalpel again. We watched in silence as the blade parted fur and skin, then cut deeper.
It was hard to tell what might be hyphae. The ligaments that connect skin to flesh are also pale and very fine. But once he opened up the chest with shears, it became clear that something had been very wrong with the hare.
“Slimy felt,” said Angus. “Like the blood—Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am. Like the blasted fish.”
Denton touched the matted surface gingerly with the tip of the scalpel. It did indeed look as if something was adhering to the surface of the organs, something slimy and fibrous, though it was a dark reddish color instead of the brilliant white of the hyphae on Madeline’s arms. The red stuff looked almost like the seaweed you see dried along the rocks on the coast, forming a sticky membrane over everything.
“The animal is female,” said Denton dispassionately. And if it were human, would it be diagnosed with hysterical catalepsy? I thought.
Miss Potter took out her magnifying glass and bent over the animal. If being six inches from the animal’s viscera troubled her, she gave no sign. “Fungal,” she confirmed.
“Would that be enough to kill it?” I asked.
“There is no way of telling,” she said, folding the magnifying glass back into its case. “We know nothing about this fungus, about its malignancy, about how long it would take to grow to this extent. Some molds can spread incredibly quickly, and this hare has presumably been dead for some time.”
“Looked like it drowned,” volunteered Angus.
“If it drowned, presumably its lungs are full of water,” Denton said, drawing the scalpel almost absently across the left lung.
The tissue retracted and the contents bulged out in a sticky white mass. It looked like cotton wool, erupting from the chest cavity as if it had been packed in too tightly to contain. Denton jerked back with a curse.
“I will go out on a limb,” I said, “and say that’s not normal for drowning.”
“Good God,” said Denton. He opened up the other lung and the white woolen mat of fungus bulged out there, too. He grabbed a fork off the table and began digging around. I felt my gorge rise. I’ve field dressed any number of animals and I don’t mind guts, but this was something else again.
Denton shook his head slowly, setting down the fork. “The lungs are packed with it. That’s not possible. Lungs aren’t hollow, they’re like a honeycomb, but this stuff got in and … it looks like it just ate the interior away somehow.”