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Henry didn’t know what to expect when he was invited to Mr. Goodsir’s tent. If anything, he anticipated that he would be once more examined, that he would cry in front of the man again, and that he would leave feeling vulnerable and insane. He did feel like that at all times now, however, since the diving incident. The image was burned into his eyelids and every time he tried to squeeze them shut so hard that he saw stars, it still persisted, the dark outline drifting closer and closer towards him.

He didn’t want to be prescribed another swig of something that made his head feel as numb as his hands and feet. He wanted it to stop; he wanted to stop feeling both panicked and heavy all at once.

He was not optimistic as he stepped inside the thick canvas hut, still feeling ice cold daggers cutting through the weave of the cloth and landing hard on his covered skin. Henry was tired, he was exhausted and yet he could not settle. A set of candles flickered on the table set up in the corner, one meant to hold bottles of medicine and medical utensils. Mr. Goodsir was sitting at this table, however, a book spread across its surface that he seemed deeply invested in. The candles’ flames glinted off the lenses of his spectacles, and the doctor looked, for once, at peace.

It was not a normal man’s peace, as there was always some tense air about him, but for Mr. Goodsir this was as close to pure calm as he could get under these circumstances. Henry didn’t want to disturb him – he just wanted to sit and take in the sight of him basked in warm light, completely entrenched in whatever it was that he was reading. It almost felt calming to him, seeing one of the most tightly-wound of their crew relaxing if for a brief moment. Like the hand he seemingly always felt around his throat had loosened its grip for a moment, giving him a chance to suck in a full breath.

The surgeon jolted in his seat and looked over to the entrance of the tent, petrified for a second before he spotted the dimly-lit visage of Henry Collins. Visibly, he settled, and that brought a faint smile to his ghostly face.

Scientists estimate that there are over ten quintillions of insects on earth at any given time. In the United States alone, there exists ninety-one-thousand identified species of insects, with over seventy-thousand unidentified. Renfield attempted to work out the number of insects that exist on every single continent, but once his results started coming back with “e+18” he quickly closed all of those tabs and stepped away from the public library’s computer. He stopped understanding numbers once they stretched into eight or nine digits in length and struggled to even count every zero in ten quintillion.

The point was, however, that in the simplest terms there were hundreds of thousands of millions of bugs anywhere in the world at any given time, and yet Renfield’s coffin-shaped stash was quickly dwindling away to crickets. What he would give for just one juicy cricket right now.

His brother Israel died five months ago.

There was no official record for it, he’d gotten into a fight at the pub and came home half-bled, bruised, barely alive, and the light left his eyes while he was just inside the door. He watched him breathe his last breaths, stayed by his side while his skin went cold, shook his shoulder and whimpered while all of his thoughts came so quickly.

Get someone, find someone right now, you can’t help him, find someone who will . But fat tears blurred his vision and his lungs heaved with sobs, his throat went tight and prickly like he was about to vomit, and he cried over Israel until he spent his last ounce of energy and collapsed on top of him. The only solace was that he wasn’t alone while he gasped his last breaths, that he died in the arms of his beloved sister.

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