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“Ah.” Lourens turned to face his worktable. Without caring about the crucial matter of hygiene, he reached out with his fingers and prodded at the insects, his weary eyes blinking in confusion. “What am I looking at?”
“We found them at a crime scene”—Roma folded his arms, tucking his shaking fingers into the fabric of his suit jacket—“where seven men lost their minds and tore out their own throats.”
Lourens did not react to the aggravation of such a statement. He only pulled at his beard a few more times, knitting his eyebrows together until they became one long furry shape on his forehead.
“Is it that you think these insects caused the men to rip out their own throats?”
Roma exchanged a glance with Benedikt and Marshall. They shrugged.
“I don’t know,” Roma admitted. “I was hoping you could tell me. I confess I can’t imagine why else we would find insects at the crime scene. The only other working theory is that a monster might have risen up from the Huangpu River and induced the madness.”
Lourens sighed. If it had come from anybody else, Roma may have felt a prickling of irritation, an indication that he was not being take
n seriously despite the severity of his request. But Lourens sighed when he was making his tea and he sighed when he was cutting open his letters. Roma had witnessed enough of Lourens Van Dijk’s temper to know this was merely his neutral state.
Lourens prodded an insect again. This time he drew his finger back quickly.
“Ah—oh. That’s interesting.”
“What?” Roma demanded. “What’s interesting?”
Lourens walked away without replying, his feet shuffling on the floor. He scanned his shelf, then muttered something under his breath in Dutch. Only when he had retrieved a lighter, a small thing red in color, did he respond, “I will show you.”
Benedikt pulled a face, silently waving an arm through the air.
Why is he like this? he mouthed.
Let him have his fun, Marshall mouthed in return.
Lourens came hobbling back. He retrieved a petri dish from a drawer underneath the worktable and delicately picked up three of the dead insects, dropping them upon the dish one after the other.
“You should probably wear gloves,” Benedikt said.
“Hush,” Lourens said. “You did not notice, did you?”
Benedikt pulled another face, this one looking like he was chewing on a lemon. Roma stifled the slightest hint of a smile that threatened his lips and quickly placed a hand on his cousin’s elbow in warning.
“Notice what?” he asked, when he was assured that Benedikt would remain quiet.
Lourens stepped away from the worktable, walking until he was at least ten paces away. “Come here.”
Roma, Benedikt, and Marshall followed. They watched Lourens pull a flame free from the lighter, watched as he brought it to the insect in the center of the petri dish, holding the burning yellow light to the insect until it started to shrivel, the exoskeleton reacting to stimuli even past death.
But the strangest thing was happening: the other two insects on either side of the burning insect were burning up too, shriveling and glowing with heat. As the insect in the middle curled further and further inward, burning with the fire, those to either side of it did the exact same.
“That’s a mighty strong lighter you have there,” Marshall remarked.
Lourens quashed the flame. He strode toward the worktable then, with a pace that Roma didn’t think him capable of, and hovered the petri dish over the rest of the dozens of insects that remained on the wooden surface.
“It is not the lighter’s doing, dear boy.”
He pushed down on the lighter. This time, as the insect under the flame turned fiery red and curled inward, so too did all the insects laid out on the table—viciously, suddenly, in a manner that almost gave Roma a fright in believing they had come alive.
Benedikt took a step back. Marshall pressed his hand to his mouth.
“How can that be?” Roma demanded. “How is this possible?”
“Distance is the determinant here,” Lourens said. “Even in death, one insect’s action is determined by the others nearby. It is possible that they do not have their own mind. It is possible they act as one—every single one of these insects that remain alive.”
