Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [49]
Without thought, the hunters begin undulating their bodies faster and faster, converging on the food source from five different directions, like swimmers from some unreleased Esther Williams horror film.
Five feet away.
Three.
There are flashes of movement. An enormous dark shape—and suddenly the leeches are struggling against tidal waves that batter them from all sides.
Although they cannot register awe (or any other emotion for that matter), this is the largest food carrier that the leeches have ever tracked.
One foot away.
The chemical signals grow stronger and the leeches can feel the heat from the food as it moves in a pulsating torrent—close now.
Inches away.
One of them batters up against a gigantic moving wall.
FOOD
As the leech tries desperately to secure its anterior suction cup, a tremendous wave smashes it away. The creature cartwheels through the turbulent foam, spinning wildly until the jagged tip of a broken reed spears it.
The skewered leech is thrown sideways. Its muscular contractions are still strong, but now they send the creature into an uncontrolled downward spiral.
Five other leeches have followed a concentration gradient of chemical cues, finally locating a breach in the impregnable, woven wall. They swarm in, fanning out and using their suckers to secure purchase.
In the mud below, another hunter stirs. The twelve hundred facets that make up the dragonfly larva’s compound eyes register movement as the wounded leech corkscrews toward it—slower now—a top running out of spin.
The predator hurtles upward, capturing the broken reed with six powerful legs. The larva’s mouthparts sink into the leech’s body, working with robotic precision to free the meal from its skewer.
From a gap in the reeds, a two-foot-long perch watches with growing interest and a hunger of its own.
Inside the impregnable woven wall, the leeches use three sets of chitenous jaws to saw their way through the thin, wire-covered rind that separates them from the food. Waves of peristaltic muscular contraction run down their elongated bodies and within seconds they begin to—
Five tiny lives blink out in succession. There is no real pain. Just the sensation of feeding…and then…nothing.
On the deck of the African Queen, Rosie helps Charlie brush off the last of the dead leeches and the salt she’s thrown on them.
Charlie Alnutt shudders. “If there’s anything in the world I hate, it’s leeches—filthy little devils!”
Long Island, New York
September 2006
As I stepped out of my car, Albert Einstein’s twin brother gave me a friendly wave. “Rudy Rosenberg,” the man said, extending a hand.
He wore a red-and-white pin-striped shirt and a blue bow tie. His white hair fell in longish corkscrews around his face. I guessed that he was in his midseventies.
“Let’s go in the back way,” Rudy suggested, stopping at a keypad before punching in the combination. I followed him into a rather plain-looking industrial building around the corner from the Long Island Expressway. I was a bit surprised that the sign out front read “Accurate” and not “Leeches USA.” I guess I’d been expecting something flashier—a stream of blood or at least some suction cups.
“There are three companies housed here,” Rudy told me several minutes later as I settled into a seat in his office. The room was comfortably cluttered—every inch of space crammed with artwork, books, journals, and memorabilia. “Accurate Chemical and Scientific, Accurate Surgical and Scientific Instruments, and Leeches USA.”
I perked up.
He looked at me over the top of his wire-frame glasses. “It’s always the leeches that people are interested in.”
Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor, began by explaining that leeches were one of the oldest therapeutic techniques known to man.
“They’ve been identified from Egyptian hieroglyphics,