A man stood outside in the falling snow, watching us—and when he saw the creature in the bowl, he raised one finger to his own right ear.
The man lowered his hand.
For one terrible moment, nobody moved.
Then I lifted the lamp higher, and the figure stepped backward into the darkness.
A branch scraped against the window.
Snow swirled across the glass.
And he disappeared.
Gideon immediately reached for his coat.
“No,” I whispered, forgetting he could not hear me.
“You can barely stand.”
He caught the meaning from my expression, but his attention remained fixed on the window.
I pressed his notebook against his chest and wrote with trembling fingers.
Who was that?
He studied the question.
Then, slowly, he wrote something that made the room seem colder.
Someone who knew I would be helpless tonight.
I looked again at the porcelain bowl.
The black creature had stretched itself across the bottom, leaving a thin red streak behind it.
It was nearly two inches long, glossy and segmented, with a narrow head that searched blindly along the porcelain.
I had grown up around livestock.
I had seen ticks, worms, and insects that burrowed beneath animal skin.
But this was different.
The creature moved with a deliberate, terrible persistence.
When I touched its back with the tweezers, it contracted into a thick knot.
Then its head lifted.
A circular mouth opened against the white bowl.
It was a leech.
I knew what leeches were, although I had never seen one so large.
Traveling physicians sometimes used them to draw blood from infected wounds.
My mother had once told me that careless doctors could cause more suffering than the illnesses they claimed to cure.
Now I understood why.
But another question immediately replaced my fear.
How had a living leech gotten inside Gideon’s ear?
And why had someone been standing outside our window, apparently waiting for it to be discovered?
Gideon stumbled toward the table.
His face had gone gray.
I guided him into a chair and carefully cleaned the blood from his neck.
He watched my hands, breathing through his mouth.
When I finished, I wrote:
Has anyone treated your ear recently?
He shook his head.
Has anyone given you medicine?
Another shake.
Then his pencil moved.
Something bitter in my coffee.
