Nick delivered the bag and the water to the lab.
"Good timing," Harper said, "I just finished the autopsy."
"So does it look like death by slow poison?" Nick asked.
She shook her head, "Stomach contents didn't turn up anything. What I did find was this." She pulled up the sheet covering the man's head, revealing that she had opened the skull.
"I saw some strange markings leading into the ear canal, and so I thought I'd take a peek to investigate. I found these." Harper showed very little emotion when she pulled out the jar, though Nick imagined with a shudder that she had that weird glint in her eye. He took the jar and nearly dropped it in shock.
The jar contained a worm, one the size of a grapefruit; pasty-white, almost as round as it was long—and still wriggling. Nick struggled to keep the contents of his stomach from crawling up his throat.
"Our guy had that in his head?" he gagged.
Harper smirked, "From what I can tell, by the way I found it attached to what was left of his brain stem, it ate his entire brain. That's what killed him." She picked up the water bottle, poured some in a paper cup and downed it.
Nick was still fighting the overwhelming nausea. "What kind of animal is it?" He couldn't bear to look at the creature again. "Do you think there could be more?"
"It does look a lot like a leech," Harper observed, "but I've never known a leech that just went after grey matter and not blood."
"So the greyness of this guy's skin—"
"Is the result of dying some time ago, and never moving. All his blood pooled around the back and lower parts of his body. I found extensive bruising, all congealed as the tissue rotted inside the bag. From the state of things, I'd say your guy's been dead upwards of, oh, six months or so."
Nick shook his head; usually a death this bizarre was the result of a Wesen, but there had been no creature involved, to his knowledge, nothing about any sort of worm in any of the books—and the strange-looking grub was certainly the cause of death.
Harper, meanwhile, had taken the grub out of the jar and was now dissecting it.
"Hmm," she remarked.
Nick tried not to look. "What?"
"Well, judging by the various states of decomposition, I'd say this worm consumed the grey matter over an extended period of time."
"So not only does a leech eat his brain," Nick's voice quivered with horror, "it was doing it slowly?"
Harper laid down her scalpel and pliers. "Looks to be that way; I'd say your guy had the worm in his head probably before he went hiking. I don't know if that helps—"
Just then, Nick's phone rang. He used it as an excuse to leave Harper to her dissecting.
"This is Nick."
"Nick?" It was Hank. "I just finished at REI. Get this: our guy was just there buying some new gear a few weeks ago."
Nick stopped on the steps of the Medical Examiner building. "Wait, did you say weeks? Hank, that carcass looked like it had been there for years! Even Harper said all the blood congealed at his back, because he was dead for so long."
"Hey, man, I don't know anything about that, but I got a name for our guy: Alden Hoffman, REI member since 1978."
"Okay, that fits our theory about a seasoned hiker. Oh, by the way, Hank, you should know: our vic got his brains eaten out by a gigantic leech."
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Read Between The Lines
Fanfiction"The Bücherwurm (book-er-verm) originates from a bookstore run by a Kinderphantasie; anyone who reads a book purchased there is infected, and the worm burrows into his brain, allowing the Kinderphantasie to feed on his imagination, incorporate him a...
