MAGGOT THERAPY
by
Everett Ambrose
“It’s getting worse. You’re going to have to try it,” my assistant persisted.
“What they suggest is superstitious and ghastly. We have modern medicine now.”
“Not here. Not in the jungle. What we have is penicillin that’s not working and help from the indigenous tribes that have been dealing with this ever since they’ve lived here.”
“Witchdoctors,” I remarked.
“Stop it. They’re trying to help you.”
From a simple bite, my leg had become almost worthless. Too painful to walk, I had been tent-bound for a week, the infection networking itself inside me. I hadn’t even seen the snake but the tribe said they can tell what bit me based on the maladies I displayed. Fever, muscle aches, sweating, restlessness.
“Hallucinations are next,” Allison said. She was the only one of us that could communicate with the indigenous.
“Hopefully some good ones. I’m not letting bugs into my body.”
Allison stalked off. My eye lids felt heavy and fluttered. I caught cut up scenes of Allison speaking to the witchdoctors with animated hand gestures before they closed to fevered darkness and infected somnolence took me to the veil.
What woke me was the sound. An overwhelming hum, so deep I felt my organs rattle in my body. I opened my eyes to the canopy of the jungle above me and a legion of flies all over my injured leg.
They must have taken me out in my sleep and laid me in the swamps where the species of fly they said would help me inhabited. The jungle was dark except for a torch they left lit, to mark my position. They had said that the flies were nocturnal and had given them the name Night Fly.
I had never seen an insect like them.
They were three times the size of a house fly, with phosphorescent glowing eyes. Their several wings caught the glow and looked like a semi-transparent stained glass. I felt them burrowing into my necrotic flash, going deep enough to hit unharmed sinew, sending bolts of pain through me. My leg looked to be almost double the size of the unharmed one; armored in an insect carapace.
Surely, I must’ve screamed. If I was, then nobody responded to me. Just panicked echoes in the distant swamps of the jungle, a scary story to frighten the children.
I tried to move my leg but I could not. The extra weight added by the Night Flies made it too painful to move. Instead I managed to roll myself off the log I was laid on. I could feel the unlucky of the flies squish into my flesh as I landed on them. The sudden movement caused them to take to the air and I could see bits of my leg again. It was bare, the pant leg had been gnawed off completely, my skin was studded with pustules and blisters.
As they circled the air in erratic maneuvers, I caught a glimpse of something just beyond them. The curtain of flies and the darkness of the swamp made it difficult to see but I saw a body standing ankle deep in the water, watching me. To say it was naked isn’t quite correct, though it hadn’t any cloths on. The body was stripped of flesh; pearly bones peaked through muscle and sinew caught the light of the torch; strands of long black hair plastered to the jelly of where skin used to be; its abdomen an emaciated cavity; its pelvis jutted as antlers from a stag.
The flies swarmed over to the body, quickly covering it from head to toe. It wore them like cloths, a squirming, humming cloak that writhed as it walked away. The few remaining Night Flies exited the tunnels they had dug into my leg and met with the walking swarm as I grew faint and darkness stole me again.
I awoke being jostled. Daylight. They were carrying me on a makeshift stretcher. Allison was there, talking to one of the men that was poking at my blisters.
She gave me a sponge bath back in the village. The fever grew worse and I was in and out of consciousness. One of witchdoctors came in to check on me. He squeezed a pustule and then a few others.
“Tell him about my blisters,” I said to Allison. She spoke with the man and he said a few words and then left. “What did he say?”
“He said they’re not blisters, they’re eggs.”
When they hatched they were the size of grubs. The pustules bore maggots that ate their way out and then ate everything necrotic around them. There were hundreds of them. Their feasting itched and sometimes hurt. They were big enough to feel their mouths when they bit down. I had to be restrained, I couldn’t take the sight of them eating my leg away. I knew that maggot therapy had been used to eat away necrosis but my symptoms persisted. Their vile, medieval methods failed and I was dying all the same.
Days later the maggots were as big as jumbo shrimp. The doctors came back and picked them off of me, one by one, and placed them in several bowls. One of them handed me a bowl and gestured for me to eat.
“No.”
He spoke with Allison for awhile, making gestures of eating, then left. Allison was white as a ghost.
“What did he say?” I asked.
It took her awhile to answer, her gaze bounced back and forth from me to the maggots.
“He said that out there you’ve seen the Spirit. That the Spirit blessed you with a boon. That the anti-venom is inside the maggots and you have to eat them to get better. He says you will die if you don’t, that to refuse the gift of the spirit is certain death.”