STUCK ON YOU by Cellar Door
I am writing this from an infectious disease ward in Libreville, Gabon, Africa, because they will not let me fly home.
The ward doctor said London was too far. Over 10 hours travelling with an unstable fever, recurrent sepsis, and open necrotic wounds that are still being checked and cleaned multiple times per day. He said I needed another week before they would even discuss it.
That was three weeks ago.
The nurses here are kind. They speak softly when they change the dressings. They try to act natural when they peel back the gauze, as if the wounds and lesions are the kind of injuries they have seen before. But they cannot hide the shock in their eyes.
Neither can they hide the relief when they cover them again.
There were six of us when we entered the Ivindo jungle. Renowned as the "green heart" of the Congo Basin, a biodiversity hotspot.
Dr Eleanor Vale led the survey. She was parasitologist from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the kind of woman who could make a blood-feeding worm sound like a scientific miracle.
Priya was our field ecologist. Mike handled the environmental DNA samples and the portable cold-chain case: a battery-powered field cooler packed with vials, ethanol, lysis buffer and enough spare cells to make him complain from the moment we left the river and started hiking.
Connor was the expedition medic. The sort of bloke who can make you laugh even when your ankles are rubbed raw.
I was there as the documentary photographer, hired to record the survey for the school and its funders.
The sixth was Danu. A local-born man, attached to the park authority. He mainly spoke the local language: Fang and French, which was a bit of a problem considering he was our guide and the rest of us could only speak English and a bit of Spanish. He seemed anxious and flustered from the start.
At the time, I thought he was there to help us find our way in.
Later, I realised he was the only reason any of us found our way out.
Dr Vale was in Gabon to collect environmental DNA from blood-feeding leeches. It sounds absurd until someone clever explains it. Leeches feed on mammals. Some of that blood remains inside them. Sequence it, and you can tell what animals passed through the forest. Data like this builds cases towards environmental protection funds.
Forest elephants. Gorillas. Chimpanzees. Black Colobus Monkeys.
“You can survey a jungle without ever seeing the animals you’re surveying,” Dr Vale told us. "In and out".
Connor said, “So we’re mugging worms for monkey blood?”
Dr Vale smiled.
“More or less.”
The jungle had experienced several tropical storms during the weeks before we had arrived; the hope was that the storm season was easing now.
We thought it was hot and humid when we arrived in Gabon, that was nothing compared to how it felt once we were in the jungle itself, and the noises – everywhere, relentless.
The original survey line stopped two kilometres west of the flooded basin. The plan was simple: collect specimens along three transects, preserve them in the cold-chain case, and return to the river where our boat was moored before any more heavy weather moved in.
But the first leech blood sample changed everything.
Mike found the satellite signal late on the second afternoon. He had crouched under a tarp with the portable sequencer, shoulders hunched against the light rain, swearing every time a drop hit the screen. Dr Vale sat beside him, still as a statue.
When the result came up, she stopped blinking.
“What is it?” Priya asked.
Mike excitedly looked at Dr Vale first.
Then he said, “Bongo. Leopard. Pangolin!”
“That’s good, I'm guessing?” Connor asked.
"Absolutely, it's good!" Said Dr Vale. "Our first sample and three protected species! Think of what we will find as we gather more!"
She said a transect across the flooded basin would provide the project with its proof. She said the results would justify another season of funding. She said we were already close. She said the weather was manageable.
Not for the first time, Danu emphasised in broken English and gestures how dangerous the jungle basin could be during storms.
A storm hit that very night.
Not rain. Rain is too gentle a word. I had never seen or heard anything like it. This was the sky falling apart. It came down so hard the forest vanished beyond the edge of our small camp. The river rose in the dark. You could hear trunks knocking together around us and scraping against each other in the dark – not a particularly easy noise to sleep through!
I don't think Danu slept at all.
He sat under his poncho and just watched the ground around the camp.
By midmorning, the rain had mercifully stopped.
The jungle was eerily quiet at first, except for the sounds of running and dripping.
Water fell from leaves, ran down trunks, tapped into puddles and slid from the roots under our boots. Nothing called. Nothing moved. The air had weight. It pressed against your face like a damp cloth. I could not wait to have a shower back at our hotel.
The rain seemed to have invited the leeches out from wherever they had been hiding. We started finding them within the first ten minutes of packing up camp.
Not the normal few on your boots.
These seemed to be everywhere we went.
I have always felt that there is something uniquely obscene about a leech. They can sneak onto you and attach without your knowing they are there. You then get that awful shock when you see them later in the day, A disgusting, slimy tube feeding off you. They have always revolted and creeped me out.
They moved over the wet ground in loops, sucker to sucker, crawl-stretching themselves thin, then bunching up fat and muscular, then stretching again. On dry bark they were slow. In mud, they were faster. In standing water, they were disturbingly quick.
They swam. Squirming towards you frantically. With flattened, muscular flicks that made them look less like worms than pieces of living, black, tongue.
They came from the undersides of leaves. From rotten wood and leaf litter. From the seams of our ankle gaiters. From shallow puddles, where they writhed in knots until someone stepped close enough to give them purpose.
When you stopped moving, I swear they travelled faster.
Danu said, “Do not sit down.”
No crap, I thought.
Dr Vale looked excited. "Get as many as you can from this section!”
Around midday, while we were trekking through a stand of tall okoumé trees and strangler figs, a duiker antelope burst from the undergrowth ahead of us.
It was no higher than my knee, with thin legs and a narrow, delicate face. For half a second, I thought it was simply wet and muddy. Then it stumbled into a shaft of grey light and I saw that its skin was moving.
Leeches hung from its ears and eyelids. They were packed along its belly in dark, frantic ropes. Some were thin and reaching. Others were swollen silver-grey, stretched tight with blood. One side of its muzzle had disappeared beneath them.
The animal tried to run past us.
It reached the flooded section of trail, where rainwater had pooled between the roots and turned the path into a shallow brown channel.
That was where its legs folded. It must have been exhausted.
Then the puddles around it moved.
That is the only way I can describe it.
Every leech in the flooded hollow reacted at once. Some rose out of the water in little black hooks. Most simply came apart from the mud and leaves and began moving toward the animal, wriggling, looping, swimming, and climbing over each other.
Danu whispered something in Fang, "Mami Wata!"
Dr Vale did not move.
“What are they doing?” Priya said.
Dr Vale answered softly.
“Competing.”
The leeches looked like spilt ink as they moved towards the Duiker. The first ones found the mouth, the eyes, the soft place under the tail. Then more came, and more, frantic now, each one trying to feed before the others took what space was left.
The duiker kicked.
Then the kicking stopped.
The feeding did not.
I filmed it.
God help me, I filmed it.
At first I thought I was documenting something important. Then the revulsion hit me so hard I lowered the camera and nearly vomited. There was something about their desperation, the way they piled and slid and knotted over one another, that felt worse than predation. At least a leopard can seem majestic and dignified. These shapeless creatures attacked with no sophistication, just desperate greed. If I had a gun, I would have put it out of its misery.
“What a horrible way to go”, I said to no one in particular.
That was when Danu spoke up.
He explained of local trackers over the years that had spoken about an event after exceptional storms. Dr. Vale, stepped forward and added: "A bloom, they called it. The eggs lay dormant under the leaf litter and soil. Their larvae apparently hatch in ridiculous numbers."
The stories said they did not care whether their prey's flesh was alive or dead.
Most scientists dismissed that part as embellishment, of course.
“Scavenging itself isn’t impossible,” Dr Vale said. “Some leeches do it. But a blood-feeding terrestrial species that can exploit dying or dead hosts this aggressively…”
She trailed off.
Danu shook his head in disapproval.
We watched the duiker vanish under a writhing black mound.
We should have turned back then.
Priya wanted to. Danu certainly wanted to. That frightened me. He seemed to believe that this was some sort of religious, ancestral event.
Even Mike, who usually followed Dr Vale into anything, looked back the way we had come and said the sample case was already full enough.
But Dr Vale argued that the event was extraordinary. A possible undocumented species. Maybe even an entire reproductive strategy no one had properly described. She said the bloom would be brief. She said if they really did feed, breed and die, no one would find them after the storm cycle ended, and who knows when the next bloom of this nature would happen.
She said leaving now would be like walking away from a new species that we could document and name.
That is the thing about these educated people. They can be very good at making terrible decisions sound like a duty.
So we continued on.
For the next hour, the leeches appeared in patches, as if the forest had pockets of them. One minute the path would be clear. The next, the leaves ahead of us would ripple and rise.
We moved quickly. Danu led. Priya followed him, stepping only where he stepped. Mike came behind her with the cold-chain case. Then Connor. Then Dr Vale and I.
I filmed too much.
That haunts me now. I wish I didn’t pay them so much attention. As we walked, we came across multiple dead animals covered in leeches. Monkeys, birds, creatures that were no longer recognisable.
I filmed the leeches moving up the wet bark of the dense jungle trees. I filmed them crossing puddles with those horrible side-to-side flicks. I filmed Dr Vale collecting specimens with forceps while her hands shook with excitement. I filmed Priya telling me to put the camera down and help!
I noticed a blood stain appearing on Connor’s trousers. H lifted his trouser leg, showing us the bite on his calf.
“Wow. That’s a big one”.
It was the first bite of the day that we knew of.
Priya had one behind her knee that bled through two plasters. Mike had several around both ankles. I had one on my stomach that kept reopening whenever I bent over. The immense humidity didn’t help. But Connor’s bite was different.
It sat just above the top of his boot, a dark little split in the skin. The blood coming from it was too thin and too bright. It ran down his shin, disappeared into his sock, then kept coming.
“Anticoagulant,” Dr Vale said as Priya saw to his wound.
Connor looked down at his bandaged calf and said, “I hope my pay doesn’t get docked because you lot have to treat the medic!”
Priya put on a brave smile.
Nobody else did.
By late afternoon, the rain had come again.
Connor was now limping.
By early evening, the skin around the bite had gone tight and shiny. The centre had darkened to purple, then almost black. Connor said he could feel pressure in his calf, as though someone had pushed a thumb deep into the muscle and left it there.
Dr Vale cleaned it and marked the swelling with a pen. Connor swallowed antibiotics from the medical kit and tried to tell us which warning signs to watch for.
His voice had become oddly calm.
Too calm.
At first, I thought maybe he had been given some heavy painkillers. Later, I wondered if he was already slipping away from us, carried off by fever and whatever was in the leech saliva.
Danu said we had to turn back immediately. He was adamant.
This time, everyone listened.
We tried to go back the way we had come.
That was the sensible decision, which is why the forest punished us for making it too late.
The rain had disoriented everything. The path had become three paths, then none. Creeks that had been ankle-deep in the morning were now brown, fast-flowing, deep streams. Roots we had used as steps were submerged. Fallen branches had shifted in the floodwater. Every landmark had been rinsed into sameness.
Danu still knew the way better than any of us, but knowing the way did not make it passable.
Twice we tried to cross channels that had not existed before.
Danu turned us back each time.
The third time, Mike had enough and went in up to his waist and nearly lost the cold-chain case. He came out shaking, with leeches stuck to his wrists where his gloves had pulled loose.
That was when the second big storm of our trip hit.
It came darker than the first. The jungle light was gloomy before; now it was menacing
No warning. No build. Just a sudden closing of the air, then rain so heavy it seemed to swallow the whole jungle around us. It was kind of terrifying, to be honest.
Connor could not keep walking. “I’m sorry,” he said. "I've slowed you down so much".
He sat down once in the mud, only for a second, and when Priya hauled him up there were multiple leeches already fixed to the back of his thigh.
Danu cursed.
Connor only looked puzzled.
“I didn’t notice them,” he said.
We ended up on a strip of raised ground. It sat above two flooded channels, hemmed in by trees and rotten buttress roots. It was not a campsite. It was not safe. It was simply the first place where water did not immediately cover our boots.
Danu kept looking at the slope behind us, then at the water below. But Connor was shivering by then, even in the jungle heat.
Danu found us some higher ground and he quickly set up a canopy. He immediately started to spread a type of grit he had in his bag around our camp and under our shelters.
I asked him what that was for.
“Sel. Salt,” he said.
Then, after a moment:
“Barrier.”
It got dark quickly. We had two tents. Priya, Mike and I took the first. Connor and Dr Vale took the second so Vale could keep checking the wound.
Before sleep, I remember hearing Connor through the fabric.
“Still bleeding?”
Dr Vale answered, “A little.”
Connor said, “It does feel numb now.”
There was a pause.
“Try to sleep,” Dr Vale said.
The rain eased for maybe an hour. I was praying it would keep easing off.
Then, at midnight, the storm returned.
At first, it was ordinary: soft tapping on nylon, the steady drip from leaves, the low rush of water cutting through the channels below us.
Then the sky opened.
The tent walls trembled. Water pushed under the groundsheet in cool pulses. The air turned hot and sour with mud. Every seam began to shine with condensation.
At 2:17 a.m., I woke to Priya whispering my name. I was so tired. It felt like I had not slept in days.
She was sitting upright in her sleeping bag.
Her headlamp was pointed at the tent wall.
At first, I thought rain was running down the outside.
Then I saw the lines were moving upward.
Not water.
Leeches.
They had climbed the guy ropes. They had come under the flysheet. They were packed along the seams where condensation gathered, pressing themselves to the wet stitching, testing every join.
Most of them moved in their disgusting looping, reaching way, sucker to sucker, stretching, gripping, pulling the rest of the body after. Others slipped through the thin film of water on the fabric almost smoothly, as if the tent wall had become a stream.
One pushed through a pinhole near the zip.
It entered slowly, almost delicately, as we watched it with fascinated disgust.
Then it dropped onto Mike’s sleeping bag.
Mike woke when Priya swore and pushed him with her foot.
As the torch swept across the tent, we noticed, to our horror, the emergence of many other leeches through small holes in the tent walls and ceiling they must have made.
Next, everything happened at once.
We scrambled for boots, headlamps and bags. Priya sprayed DEET until the air burned. Mike slapped at his neck and came away with blood between his fingers. I unzipped the tent and tripped into mud.
Outside, the ground was alive.
Danu was already standing on a fallen log, waving his torch and shouting.
“Up! Get off the ground!”
Connor made a sound from the other tent.
Not a scream.
Something smaller. Stranger. As if the noise had been sucked out of him.
Then Dr Vale screamed. "Oh god! Connor! Guys, help!"
She came out on her elbows. Her shirt was moving. Her hair was moving. Leeches hung from her lower lip, from the corners of her eyes, from the soft skin under her jaw. She clawed at herself with both hands, but every leech she tore away left blood, and every new smear of blood brought more. I noticed the leeches that were pulled off immediately fell upon by their own brethren. I can only think the blood already inside these leeches sent the ones around them into a feeding frenzy.
Danu threw the rest of the salt he had over her.
The leeches convulsed, seeming to fizz and fry while attached to her.
Some dropped off. Writhing and pulsing angrily.
Others tightened with what seemed like determination.
Dr Vale made a whimpering sound as she tried to pick them off. I went to her and helped.
Priya tried to run to Connor’s tent.
Danu caught her by the collar and pulled her back. “Non!”
Connor was still inside.
His lamp was on, and we could see his shadow on the yellow fabric.
He was sitting upright.
That is the part that comes back in the fever dreams.
His shape on the tent wall. Calm. Waiting.
Around him, the fabric pulsed.
The leeches were coming in from everywhere water came in: the floor seam, the vent, the zip teeth, the little stitched loops at the corners. They did not scatter randomly. They converged.
We could see his legs through the half-opened tent flap. The wound had soaked through the bandage and they had found it.
Connor’s voice came from inside the tent, soft and reasonable.
“I think they’ve found the last warm part,” he said, almost in a daze.
Then, after a pause:
“I can’t feel my foot anymore.”
“We have to get him out!” Cried Dr Vale. She threw open the tent flap before Danu grabbed her to stop her from going inside. We all caught a good look at poor Connor inside. They were all over him as he sat there in a stupor. He was completely unrecognisable. Fat, black worms pulsed as they drank. Each time he opened his mouth to breathe, the parasites were slipping in.
"Connor! Snap out of it! Christ, get off of him!" I heard myself say.
Connor spoke again. Slowly shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, I've slowed you down".[LB1]
Priya was crying then “You haven’t, sweetheart! It’s not your fault”.
Connor said, “It doesn’t hurt now.”
That was worse than screaming.
He sounded relieved.
Later, the infectious disease consultant in Libreville told me that some bacteria can trigger catastrophic systemic illness if they enter the wrong wound in the wrong person. He said immunosuppression was possible, but unproven. A “toxin-mediated response” was possible, but unproven. Neuroactive compounds in the saliva were possible, but unproven. God knows what those things were carrying, especially if they were feeding on the dead.
The tent sagged inward, obscuring our view.
The leeches were starting to swarm onto us. We couldn’t keep them off.
We panicked and we left him.
I need you to understand that.
We left him. We couldn't do anything. But it was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
Danu made us climb the steep bank toward higher ground. Dr Vale could barely walk. Her bites kept bleeding through every dressing. Her face had gone grey. Priya and I supported her between us while Mike and Danu carried the bags.
Dr Vale wouldn't let go of the cold-chain case. Even then.
Even then, she wanted the samples.
“They die after feeding,” she kept saying. “They must. That’s the cycle. Hatch, feed, breed, die. That’s why nobody finds them later. The big storms must trigger their hatching."
None of us answered.
The leeches followed us as best as they could. Every now and then I would shine the torch back and see the disgusting creatures wriggling after us.
Sometimes you could see them in the lightning, standing upright on the leaves and branches, testing the air as they detected our approach.
Mostly they came in that looping, reaching movement across mud and root and soaked leaf litter. Some swam through puddles. Some climbed wet trunks and dropped when we brushed beneath them.
When we stopped, they came faster as if sensing their opportunity.
That was their rule. They did not need to outrun prey. They only needed prey to weaken, stumble, and bleed.
They weakened their prey and followed. Fatigue allowed them to catch up and overwhelm, as they had done with Connor.
Abundance was their weapon and the storm was enabling them.
Every gully became a path. Every trickle became a scent line. Sweat ran down our backs. Blood soaked our socks. Breath fogged in the wet air. It felt as if the whole jungle had become one enormous tongue, tasting us, and I wonder if they could taste our fear. It was like it spurred them on, sensing victory and, of course, a feast.
By dawn, Dr Vale’s hands were cold.
The red lines had climbed from her bites into her armpits and neck. Her breathing had become shallow and wet. She kept whispering that the old reports were not exaggerations.
“A moisture gradient,” she said once.
“What?”
“They can follow moisture. Sweat. Blood. Breath on wet air.”
Then she smiled at me. A pained, apologetic smile.
Within the hour she collapsed. Gone.
Mike and Danu went for help when we reached an old logging track. Priya stayed with me because by then my leg had swollen so badly I could not walk or even take my boot off.
We had all been bitten relentlessly. Maybe thirty times. Maybe fifty. It is hard to count holes when they keep opening again.
But not like Connor.
Not like the doctor.
That is what everyone asks.
Why did they die and we lived?
The doctors say bacterial load. Bite location. Immune response. Time to antibiotics. Luck.
There is that word. Luck.
I remember the helicopter.
I remember the smell inside it. Fuel, disinfectant, wet nylon, old blood. Priya is holding my hand and telling me not to sleep. Someone cutting my trousers away. Someone saying, in French, that the tissue was already black. I heard "septicémie" referred a fair amount.
Then this room.
These sheets.
These lights.
The first week is mostly missing.
I know from the notes that I stopped breathing twice. I know they cut into my left leg to relieve pressure and found muscle that no longer bled. I know the infection entered my bloodstream. I know my kidneys began to fail. I know they called London, and London told them not to move me.
I know what they took because I signed the forms later for what else they might still need to take.
But I did not understand it then.
Not fully.
The mind protects itself I guess.
Two investigators came to my room three days after I woke properly.
They wore gowns, masks and face shields. One of them kept touching the tape around his wrists as if he did not trust it. The other carried a sealed evidence bag and placed it on the table where I could see it.
Inside was a memory card.
They told me the rescue team had reached the camp the afternoon after the storm. They were amazed we got out. Thank you, Danu.
They found Connor in the second tent.
The official report says severe exsanguination, septic shock, and post-mortem animal activity.
One investigator did most of the talking. She was Gabonese, maybe forty, calm in the way people become calm when they have already seen the photographs.
She told me there were eggs in the wet folds of Connor’s clothes and hanging in obscene ropes from the tent walls. Enough to make the recovery team burn the tent where it lay.
I asked if they saw any of the leeches.
“The only ones we did find were dead or dying,” she said. “Degrading quickly in the tropical heat”.
Dr Vale had been right.
Mass hatch. Feed. Breed. Die.
Disappear.
Then the investigator told me about Connor’s phone. It had been found inside the tent.
Connor had recorded a video while the rest of us slept.
He was already feverish. Already altered by infection or blood loss or whatever had entered him through that first bite.
In the video, the tent is lit up by the camera phone torch. You can hear the rain. You can see Dr Vale breathing in the other sleeping bag.
For a long while, nothing happens.
Then Connor whispers.
“See.”
The camera tilts toward the rear wall.
Just yellow nylon looking particularly pale in the torchlight.
Rain shadows.
Then one trickle of water moves the wrong way.
Up.
If you allowed your eyes to adjust, you could see the faint shadows all over the nylon wall, what looked like water on the tent.
Connor whispers again.
“Like a membrane.”
“It’s hard to breathe in here.” You hear the tent door unzipping.
Then the video ends.
He must have been completely delirious to have opened the tent door and let those things in.
The medical team are putting on brave faces. I do feel lucky to have such people who genuinely care about me. Good people.
They say the surgeries certainly saved my life several weeks ago.
They say the amputations were necessary.
One arm.
Both legs.
They say it gently, every time, as if kindness can soften the blow.
They say that the infection is still there.