Maggots in Erebus: my familiar nightmare of these last years. The honey should prevent them from growing in my son. It should keep him, incorruptible, for a hundred years, but perhaps some knuckle or elbow has surfaced, deep down in his sepulchre, and something has found its way in. Perhaps, little by little, the preserving fluid has ebbed, or perhaps it has been eaten by sweet-toothed mice, and now these monsters rise from the black sand like the first pillar of a roundhouse going up, save that each is possessed of a segmented flexion that speaks of a scorpion’s tail. For a moment, that’s what I imagine: the stingers of scorpions hovering over the streaming dead. In one instant I see that they are men, sicarii with long arms and sharp knives, and then I see their faces, mandible and inhuman, and know that they are maggots, born in the flesh of the dead. I am in Erebus, and must fight my way to the heart.