Maplecroft (18 page)

I
have a few patients this afternoon, but tomorrow morning I’ll pay the ladies a visit. I don’t know whether that friend of theirs will be present, and I don’t know whether she’s aware of the murders—the new murders, or new deaths, or . . . I don’t know. Even when I compose my confessions to no one but myself, I can’t seem to get my head straight.

Every minute, my thoughts are occupied by fear.

At first I thought it was merely the flush of chemicals that flood the human body at the prospect of danger, excitement, or imminent threat. At first I thought it was only some leftover shaking, unresolved from that night with Ebenezer and that first day with Wolf, when we saw the corpses.

But that was only at first.

And now . . . now that’s not what I think. Too much other strangeness abounds, and not all of it is contained within my
head. I haven’t the mental scope or imagination to produce it, only to recognize it, when it presents itself in patterns.

I walk down the street and I peel my eyes for signs of the dangerous taint—the sickness, if I must call it something mundane.

I watch for signals and symptoms; I gaze from beneath the brim of my hat, observing those who pass me by. I watch the men and women in the cafes and restaurants, and I watch them on the pier. I watch them about their business, running their daily errands, lifting their babies from basinets and riding their bicycles, buying their groceries, greeting the milkman, ordering seeds for their gardens. I stare at them while they’re measured by tailors, searching their bags for coins to hand to the paperboy, collecting their mail, hanging their laundry pin by pin upon the lines—that it might dry in the sun, when the sun peeks through this oddly weathered spring. I scan their faces and their gestures, their postures, the gait of their walks, the flush of their cheeks, the way they count on their fingers or use their toes to nudge the neighbor’s cat off the stairs and out of their paths.

I count how many times they blink.

If I’m not careful, I’ll go mad. If I’m not careful, worse things yet may occur. So I remain careful, and I take my notes when I take my tea, and I brew coffee strong enough to keep my eyes wide-open as I make my rounds.

And I will record the things that I’ve seen, even if they seem trivial and unrelated. I do not know what relates to what, so everything must be mentioned and cataloged. Everything must be seen and remembered.

It’s all written down. Not here, but in the patient folders.

Mr. Wells has developed a strange pattern of moles on his back, veritably overnight. Not shingles, not pustules, but moles with a spreading pattern, not unlike a swirl, a whirlpool, a twist
of water. At first he swore that it itched and ached, but his wife confided that he’s getting worse, and he’s begun talking to the pattern and listening for a response. At night she hears something, it sounds warm and wet, and it smells like brine and seaweed in the sun.

Miss Fox’s parents insist she’s been feverish for two days, but when I visited she was clammy and cold, and her eyes would scarcely focus. She insisted she’s fine, and wants to go back to school. I suggested another two days of bed rest. Something is amiss. Her mother says she won’t stay in bed, but wanders the house at night, tapping her hands against the windows as if blindly feeling her way around the rooms, and when she walks in her sleep she whispers,
“Out, out, out . . .”
until they force her back to bed.

They’ve forced her back to bed, and lashed her foot to the post like a hobbled horse. (Like Matthew, before he went mad and murderous.)

Mrs. Williams lives around the corner from the Hamiltons’ store and she’s called for the police twice in the last week, confident that there’s someone moving around inside the shop, someone trying to break down the walls and come through the building itself, trying to get
out, out, out
. Last night she was found on her front lawn, beneath the big oak in the yard, covered in blood. She stood in her nightdress, muttering about how she’d opened everything, she’d broken the windows and it could get out now, couldn’t it? It would quit asking her now, wouldn’t it?

I treated her cuts, and when I cleaned them I saw they were sliced in patterns, not the ordinary patterns of a window’s shattered shards, but in horizontal lines, back and forth, very deep. It didn’t match her story, but what could I say? Still she spouted
nonsense, unless it wasn’t nonsense. I gave her an opiate and sent her to sleep at her sister’s house, at the other side of town.

There’s more.

Several more I ought to mention here, and they all feel like a pattern, or part of one. But someone is knocking at the door, and it’s the kind of knock that says to come
now
.

A
PRIL
25, 1894

I should’ve known something untoward was going on when I started sleeping better.
Suspiciously
better. Ordinarily I snap awake in the morning, shortly after dawn, no matter how late the previous evening has kept me working; but these last few nights, I’d drop to sleep and stay that way until seven or eight, and most recently, all the way to nine o’clock.

It was foolish to pretend that nothing was afoot or amiss, and it was more foolish still of me to pretend that Nance had nothing to do with it. She’s the only new variable in the household.

No, that’s not quite true.

There’s Doctor Seabury. His knowledge of what we do here—even if it was, at first, a rudimentary understanding of what we’re up against—
that’s
new, and it counts for something.
But up until this evening, I could not have asked him to drop everything and come sit beside me, and listen to my tales of woe as if he had nothing better to do.

Now I know.

I’ve been looking at this all wrong.

This
is
the highest priority, for me, for Emma, and for him—for anyone who has any inkling of what’s going on. I know it is. It must be. But progress on the matter has been so slow, and escalation had appeared to plateau until recently. My God, I’d become almost complacent about it.

About
them
. The creatures with the shark-white skin and glass-needle teeth.

But there have only been a few, and no new visitations since that one I killed in the middle of March. No new visitations of any kind except . . . well, Nance, and that’s not the same.

Yet it’s not unrelated, either. She came, and
she
caused this new escalation, but that’s my fault. Mine entirely. I should’ve sent her right back home on the same train she arrived in. I should’ve thrown her luggage out on the lawn and told her to make her way back to the city. I should’ve pushed her away, chased her away,
thrown
her away if it came to that.

I didn’t. And look what it’s gotten me.

Look where it’s gotten
us
.

I
awoke to Emma’s bell, but I awoke slowly and unhappily. I wasn’t ready. I was dreaming of Nance, and there was silk. Silk dresses? Sheets? Something soft and luxurious, something that flowed and billowed. Something dry and smooth, but soft as mist. I can’t recall, but wherever it was, whatever the dream was about . . . I didn’t want to leave it.

But the bell rang and rang and rang, with all of Emma’s strength, and I was compelled to answer it.

I tried to rise out of the covers, and I stumbled, falling to all fours. My head was swimming.
I
was swimming, my arms and legs made of some slippery, uncertain substance. Still stuck in the dream, they were. That’s where I was swimming, I guess, wherever the world was made of silk sheets and quiet.

I forced myself to climb up, using the bed itself for support. And I realized then what I should’ve noticed immediately: Nance wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was empty, and when I placed a hand on the indentation her body had made in the comforter, I found no warmth to suggest she’d only just left me.

And then it all fell into place.

My wobbly brain, my sleep growing longer by the night. Her fixation with the cellar door, all talk of lovers’ bargains aside. Lies, and treachery. She’s been drugging me, testing the dose to see what would send me deepest to sleep, and keep me there longest. She’s been waiting for us to move Emma back upstairs, so that Emma wouldn’t catch her by accident, or see her as she slipped downstairs to the door.

Perhaps oddly, I understood all of these things even before I noticed that the key was gone.

Sometimes it’s funny, the way the mind works. How it assembles the minor pieces before the major ones arrive, solving the mystery in reverse, before all the clues are provided. It could’ve been the drugs—whatever she’d used against me. Some syrup or serum. Something that hid the big things but let me see the little ones.

I slapped my hand against my chest, where the cellar key usually hung on its chain. No, it wouldn’t be there. It’d be on the dresser. I stumbled to the dresser, my feet still refusing to
cooperate with me, not fully. I felt a moment’s jolt of relief, even as Emma’s bell still rang, because there it was—the chain with the attendant key I always wore against my breasts.

Then I picked it up.

I examined it, squeezing it to reassure myself that all was well. But all was not well. Emma was still ringing. Her wrists must’ve been about to fall off. It must’ve been exhausting, the ringing all this time. But still I ignored it, not quite alert enough to attend to more than one thing at a time. The key in my fist. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t the cellar key, but some clever replacement, originally fitting the lock to God knew what. God knew where she’d found it.

God knew what she’d done.

I went for my wardrobe—almost fell into it, if the truth be known. I bruised myself against it as I wrestled the door open and pulled out my axe, which I did not leave out in the open when Nance was around, not anymore. I’d started hiding it, like it was some secret. Like she hadn’t seen it already. She liked it a little too much, that was all. It made me feel strange.

“Emma!” I shouted, having heard all I could stand of the bell. “Emma, I’m up! I’m coming!”

I ran down the hall, my knees still feeling like they weren’t quite mine, and weren’t quite connected to my body. It was a jerky stumble at best, but I stayed upright and dashed to Emma’s room, where I looked in and saw at a glance that she was alive, and unharmed, and that Nance wasn’t with her.

“Nance . . . ,” she gasped.

“I’ll get her,” I swore, half out of breath already.

I didn’t stay to hear her reply. I made for the stairs, where I tripped over my own toes and went face-first into the
banister—and I caught myself, dragged myself to a stop before I’d gone down too terribly far, and shook the ringing out of my ears. It wasn’t Emma’s bell anymore. It was just the incessant hum of my head trying to force the rest of me more fully awake, because this was bad. Worse than bad. Worse than terrible, and worse than whatever is worse than that. I felt it in my bones, and my bones were still shaking—not yet ready to hold me up. My legs ached, and I wondered quite seriously if I hadn’t fractured something.

(I turned out to be right, but it wasn’t my leg after all; it was my nose when it slammed against the edge of a step, or one of the banister rods. I have no idea which. I didn’t see the blood until later.)

I didn’t know what Nance would do if she found the cellar. Would she see the equipment and investigate it? Destroy it? Demolish my research at the behest of whatever drew her down there? What if she found the cupboard in the floor?

What would that mean? What would it do?

I made it to the bottom of the stairs by the skin of my teeth, collected myself, and retrieved the axe. (It had fallen out of my grasp and toppled the rest of the way down without me.) I scrambled into the kitchen, and there, yes—the cellar door. Flung open. Swinging slowly on its hinge, and a soft rushing noise like wind in a cave escaping past it, up into the house.

Hoarsely I screamed Nance’s name, and took a better grip on the axe, praying that I wouldn’t need it. I didn’t know if I could kill her, if it came to that. I didn’t know what I’d do when I found her, or what she would’ve done to herself.

What was calling her?

It must’ve been the stones, yes. Sealed in their box, and sometimes that wasn’t enough to keep even me from hearing them, and becoming enraptured. I’d learned the price of listening to them,
and I knew how much I had to lose. Nance didn’t. Nance didn’t deserve to be in the middle of this.

The lights were on, down there. The glow seeped up from between the steps, which were only wood slat things—I’d never installed anything sturdier, feeling that it wasn’t worth the trouble. The glow was yellow, not the vivid white of the gas lamps, and I told myself that it didn’t mean anything. I mumbled as I descended, insisting that it could’ve been worse—it could’ve been green.

“Nance?” I called again, and my head still spun, for I was still half stuck in the dreams from which I’d been so rudely dragged. I forced myself to work against the drugs, planting my feet one in front of the other, going a tad more slowly, clutching the handrail as I went because I wasn’t sure I could get back up again, should I take another spill. My body already ached all over from the first one.

I heard her voice.

She murmured something, and I couldn’t hear it. One word, or one syllable anyway. It could’ve been anything, but it meant she was alive and that she was still capable of responding to me. My panic wasn’t entirely soothed, but such was my joy at hearing her that I took the last steps two at a time and almost fell again, but caught myself—using the axe as a cane to steady my balance upon my arrival.

“Nance, where are you? What have you done?”

My eyes answered both questions.

She’d found the cupboard in the floor. The stones themselves had told her where they were, and how to find them, and what they wanted.

She’d retrieved the box they were kept in, and now they were scattered around the ground, except for the one set in a
necklace. It’d been Mrs. Borden’s. It was the necklace I’d taken, after she was dead. Now Nance wore it, and the sight filled me with misery.

She was lying beside the hole in the floor, cupboard opened and box exposed, emptied. Its contents scattered. Her breathing was shallow, too fast, not normal at all. Her eyes were glazed over, and she stared at the ceiling—where there was nothing to see.

I flung myself down at her side, dropping the axe and seizing her by the shoulders. I shook her, but she didn’t respond. I dragged her as far as I could, or as far as I dared, then I left her, gathered the scattered stones, and threw them back into the box.

My safeguards hadn’t worked, but they were all that remained in my arsenal.

I reached back to her and wrenched her fist open. I retrieved the stone she held there, too, and saw that it’d burned a weird shape into her skin, but what it meant (or if it meant anything at all), I didn’t know and didn’t have time to decide. I tore the necklace off her, shattering the clasp. I threw it into the box as well, closed the lid, fastened the bands, and dumped it down into the cupboard. I closed the cupboard door and dragged one of my desks over to it, as if the added weight would hold it down.

Ridiculous superstition, just as Emma would’ve called it, but Jesus, what else did I have to work with?

I returned again to Nance, who was lying as if catatonic, slack-jawed and lovely, there on the floor. She wasn’t blinking. Just breathing a quick staccato in and out, her chest fluttering. Her burned hand opening and closing like a flower.

I slapped her cheek, gently at first. Then harder. Then I said her name as I did so, and I realized that I was crying and bleeding both—when the blood splashed down onto her nightdress. I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand, and left a trail of
scarlet down my arm, but I did not care. I only cared about her, as inert as a doll except for that uncanny pace of breath.

I couldn’t leave her there.

I had to move her. Could I move her? I looked up at the stairs that would take us to the first floor, and I considered it. I had to try.

I wedged myself under her shoulders, using my arm and my badly bruised legs to lift her, and haul her upright. She didn’t fight me, but she didn’t do much to help—though to her credit, when I made her stand, her knees locked and she remained upright, so long as I prevented her from falling over. I guided her through the cellar, around the repositioned table, past the damnable cupboard, over to the stairs, and I hauled her bodily up them. She cooperated only so much. Maybe she couldn’t do any better. Maybe she didn’t know how anymore. I can’t say, and I shuddered to consider—all I could do was insist to myself that she was only stunned, and would surely awaken any minute now.

Any minute. That’s what I told myself as she languidly moved her legs up and down, not really catching the steps in order to climb them, but going through the motions through the sheer memory of her muscles. (Any minute, she’ll come to her senses. Any minute, she’ll find her footing. Any minute, and I’ll have her back.)

I slammed the cellar door, but didn’t lock it yet. I still wasn’t sure where the key was, and anyway, the damage was done.

Emma was calling for me, but I couldn’t deal with her, not quite yet. Not when I had Nance out of the basement at long last, but sprawled now upon the kitchen floor and looking like a corpse.

I slapped her again, until I was afraid I’d harm her should I hit her any harder, but I received no response. Her breathing slowed somewhat, as if distance from the cupboard had allowed her body to return to something like normalcy; but still she
didn’t blink, didn’t answer, didn’t show any sign that she knew where she was or what she was doing there.

Upstairs, I heard Emma shake the bell one last time and then in frustration, she flung it into the hallway. “Lizzie!” she shrieked, though her voice was almost gone. It came out in a fierce whisper with an edge like a razor.

At a loss, I replied, “Coming!” and on the way up the stairs again, I realized I hadn’t used our secret phrase—but then again, I’d been replying from the kitchen, not the cellar.

I dragged myself up the steps to the second floor, and by the time I reached Emma’s room I could scarcely stand. I was drained and aching, and my brain wouldn’t yet stop sloshing around in my skull. Whatever Nance had given me, it’d done its job well, and it wasn’t quite finished working.

Emma was out of her bed, leaning against the tall wooden post at the foot. She asked me, “Well?”

“Nance got into the cellar,” I replied, summing up the situation.

She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “And?”

“And I don’t know!” I put my face in my hands, but when I covered my eyes the world still wavered, as if I were drunk. I changed my mind and ran my fingers through my night-tousled, unchecked hair instead. “She’s on the floor in the kitchen, and she . . . she isn’t responding,” I said, trying to force myself to treat this like a scientist, as if this must be new data. But it wasn’t new data. It was my lover, and she wasn’t herself right now. For all I knew, she might never be herself again—she could twist and warp and transform into one of the monsters with the glass-needle teeth, and then I’d have to kill her, and put her body into the cooker, and pretend that the juices and stench that remained were never the soft flesh and warm hair of the woman I’d loved.

“Go get Seabury,” she said, and even through the effort of speaking, and the exhaustion in her voice, I heard impatience and anger. “We need him. You’re bleeding.”

“He won’t know what to do any better than we do,” I argued.

“You don’t have any better ideas, do you?”

I shook my head. “I’ll . . . I’ll send for him.”

“Go get him yourself.”

“And leave her here? Alone in the house with you? When we don’t know what she’ll do . . . or what she’ll
be
 . . . when she comes around again?” I didn’t say the rest of what I feared, that of course, she might never come around again at all—and I didn’t know if that’d be worse. I was too afraid of too many things at once. They all swirled together fighting for dominance. None of them won. Or they all did, however you chose to look at it.

“All right, then. Jacob, next door.”

“Right,” I said, perking up at the scent of a plan. “I’ll go get him, right now. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

The neighbor’s boy was ten years old and constantly offering to do odd jobs for money. It was late, and he’d be in bed—but a light still burned in a window at the big white house next door to ours, and I had no qualms at all about declaring an emergency. I said it was my sister, and we needed the doctor, but I couldn’t leave her. Emma’s condition was well-known, and it was the easiest, nearest lie I could offer and expect to receive any help.

I offered his parents a fistful of coins, probably three or four times what he would’ve asked, even at that hour. The boy hopped on a horse, and was gone.