Maplecroft (2 page)

Upon
reaching the cellar’s floor I turned on the two largest gaslights, and the bleak, cluttered space was flooded with a quivering white light that joined the illumination from the stairs. I blinked against it. I set one hand on the nearest table and leaned there while my eyes adjusted, and when they did, I took a very deep breath and considered the week’s samples.

My laboratory is a large open room, undivided except by two rows of three tables each. Several of the tables are occupied by jars of assorted sizes, ranging from tubes as small as my thumb to
bigger containers that could easily hold a loaf of bread. Floating within them in an alcohol solution are things I’ve collected over the last two years. Some are recognizable as varieties of ordinary ocean flora and fauna, and some are not. I’ve gathered plants, fish, sea jellies, crustaceans, and cephalopods by the score, and I’ve cataloged them all by their deformities. Some are laden with so many aberrations that it’s impossible to tell what the original species might have been; some have minor exterior problems, though these malformations often mask more obvious internal ones.

For example, one of my larger jars holds a brown octopus
(octopus vulgaris)
with two distinct heads and three extra tentacles. Upon a cursory dissection of it, I discovered that it also had twice the usual complement of hearts—which is to say six of them. Two of these hearts were pitiably underdeveloped, but distinct and bafflingly present.

I’ve also found fish with too many sets of gills, grotesquely oversized fins, or no eyes whatsoever. I’ve retrieved lobsters with three claws, with one claw, with no tail, or no legs. The story is much the same for simpler creatures, though the abnormalities are sometimes harder to spot.

My conclusions, such as they are, sound like utter madness. But I believe they are borne out by the books that are stacked on the other desks, where I’ve had to establish the library. We couldn’t put shelves along the wall or else the damp would ruin them, so two of the farthest tables are stacked with shorter bookcases. Each of these cases is piled with volumes too arcane and peculiar to display upstairs, despite the fact that we virtually never see visitors.

Upon reflection, I’m not entirely sure who I’m hiding them from. Not Emma. She’s the one who ordered most of them, and regardless, she’s read them already.

Nance? No, I don’t think so. Nance is difficult to scandalize, and she’s aware of my interests—though not aware of their extent, or their origins. If pressed, I’d have to say that I’m hiding the books from Nance’s friends, who sometimes accompany her when she visits.

Or maybe I only do it out of optimism, from the eternal hope that someday we’ll have friends of our own again.

It’s ridiculous, I know. My infamy taints my sister, who declares her intent to stay by my side even as we both know she’s too fragile for any other recourse. And it’s furthermore ridiculous because our respective activities require a certain solitude. I must be left alone to pursue my experiments, and Emma could never continue her correspondences with eminent scientists and biologists if anyone knew that “E. A. Jackson” was a woman. Thank heavens none of her correspondents has ever dropped by for a spot of tea. I honestly don’t know what she’d tell them.

It’s a blessing, really, that no one will have anything to do with us.

I
picked up the nearest lantern and lit it. It’s a special one, affixed with mirrors and foils, to direct the light wherever I wish to project it—and I wanted to brighten the back right table, beside the two oversized sinks and an assortment of hoses, hooks, tongs, knives, and scalpels. There, in one of my larger jars, a peculiar mass had sunk to the bottom, where it sizzled enough to muster a light froth that foamed throughout the container. It’d been sizzling that way for two days, while an acid solution nibbled away at the calcite. Within that mass, I have always sensed there was something important.

When I first discovered it, the object was approximately the size of a small melon, and it lacked any geometric shape to speak
of. If I were to assign it any general description, I’d say that it looked like a very large hand grabbed a fistful of the ocean bottom and squeezed until the sediment became stone. It was roughly column-like, with bits of finny fluting. Primarily it was white, or the swirled browns and bleached hues of ocean detritus.

I found it on one of my evening walks on the beach, after dark with a lantern. And at the risk of sounding hysterical, I believe that I
felt
it. I believe that it called me, and I heard it.

So I retrieved it, setting my lantern on the sand and hefting the rock into my hands, holding it there. Though it was in no way shaped like a shell, I held it up to my ear and listened—for what, I cannot say.

But this draw, this
lure
. I’ve felt it before and I don’t yet understand the full implications of what it means, but I know I should’ve taken more care with the sample. I should’ve wrapped it in my apron and carried it that way, without touching it bare-handed, but I didn’t. I cradled it in one naked arm and held my light aloft with the other, all the way back home.

There, I returned to my senses and dumped it into the jar full of acid to let science sort it out.

I
forcibly tugged my attention away from the bubbling, hypnotic jar and turned instead to a box I keep buried beneath the floor.

With a quick pop of a pry bar at just the right spot, a row of boards slipped out of place. My floor is not as seamless and immutable as it appears; it is riddled with compartments such as this one.

Some people keep cupboards in a wall. I keep them in the ground.

Beneath this lid, which I’d disguised as flooring, a box
squatted—smelling of wet soil and worms, and moss, and lichen, and whatever else blackens the earth below my home. I could have pried it out and brought it up to the floor, but I chose not to. For some reason, I felt that the box was safest right there, underneath everything. Underneath my house, my basement, my floor.

I would bury it deeper if I could, but I need to keep it within reach, this little repository of evil. Soon, I might need to add to its contents—depending on what lies at the heart of that strange mass which dissolves by atoms on the back right table.

I’m not sure what made me reach into the hole and touch the iron-bound top of that box.

Yes, again, I’m mired in uncertainties and suspicions, but I have taken all the precautions I can. More than likely, at least half of them don’t work. But when I don’t know what works and what does
not
work, all I can do is throw it all in together, and trust that some measure of success will result, even if that success is diluted by imprecision.

So there is a box that is lined with lead and sealed with iron bands, and inscribed with unsettling symbols, and buried in the earth, beneath the rowan-wood boards that make up the floor of my basement.

I reached down into the hole and fumbled with the latches until it was unfastened all around, and then I lifted the lid for no good reason whatsoever. I’d like to say that the motion was dreamlike on my behalf, that I scarcely recall doing it; but this isn’t quite true, because I remember watching my arm extend, and my fingers manipulate the fasteners, and then lift the lid. I recall every bit of this, and in my recollection, I was fully in control of myself.

Except that I
can’t
have been.

Because now, with some distance from that box and that basement, I know full well that it was a dangerous, absurd thing to do—and that not all the gold in the world, nor all the threats or complaints, could ever persuade me to open it right now, with nothing to add to its treasure.

And I jot this down, all of it, in case—upon eventual review—some pattern is revealed. These journal entries are already helping, for now I can see, going back over last month’s notes, that there’s a proximal effect to the lure of the box. The farther I remove myself from its contents, the less they affect me.

If I had any sense, I’d relocate to the desert or the mountains, and be done with this whole business once and for all.

I
gazed into the box, upon six bits of stone or glass, all varying in their respective radiance and greenness. They go from the sickly yellowish shade of a toad’s belly to a rich seaweed that could nearly be described as emerald. The smallest is the size of a child’s fingernail. The largest is as big as a plum. All of them are beautiful. Very beautiful. So beautiful it’s all but impossible to take one’s eyes away, even though they look like nothing more alarming than bits of sea glass, glittering weakly at the bottom of a reinforced box.

Of course, they are more than that. I know it good and well, just like I know better than to kneel over the box and listen to the odd hum they make. But it’s a lovely hum, you see? It’s a calming, drawing thing. When I hear it, as I stare at those scattered pieces of precious jetsam, it’s as if I can hear my mother beside my cradle, and feel the rocking of her gentle hand as she sings me off to a nap.

No, not the recently late Mrs. Borden—but my
true
mother,
Sarah, who died when I was very small. I have no real remembrance of her, but sometimes I think I recall a perfume, or a very distant voice. The rustle of a skirt, perhaps. A step upon the stairs. Emma says she was a pretty woman, and that she often hummed to herself while she worked around the house.

I envy my sister’s solid memories.

My father married Abigail when I was two, and Abigail raised me, albeit reluctantly and without any warmth. She’d wanted to be a society wife, not the live-in caretaker for two girls who were not her own.

She did not let us forget it often, or for long.

(I was instructed to call her “Mother” when I was tiny. This was insisted upon to great penalty if I failed, though Emma was old enough that she was never commanded to do the same. I finally began to refer to her as “Mrs. Borden” when I realized that I was an adult, and that no one could make me do otherwise. I did not owe that cold, interloping daughter of a pushcart peddler the respect of the more personal term.)

I’d
left the box open longer than I should have.

I knew this even before Emma came knocking, but it’s strange—I couldn’t seem to care. I was fully aware that I was tempting fate or something worse, and I was all too certain that the buzzing, warm green noise could be heard by more ears than just my own. But the stones were beautiful, and they were near. They calmed me, nearly to the point of a stupor.

Emma had called twice from upstairs, and she’d been pounding upon the cellar door for half a minute before I was able to rouse myself enough to say in a choked, weird voice, “Emma dear, I’m nearly finished.”

I thought I heard her sob. She cried, “Lizzie, you must
come, quickly. Something . . . something is trying to come inside. Lizzie, something is
here
.”

I slammed the box lid back down and dropped the board atop it, cursing myself for my inattention and reflexively seeking the weapon I keep leaned against the bottom of the staircase.

There it was, yes.

I grabbed my axe.

M
ARCH
15,1894

The first thing I ever learned of my patients is that they lie, incessantly and to their own detriment. They mislead me regarding their injuries; they feign symptoms; they deny delicate but pressing problems out of modesty or embarrassment, or fear of repercussions.

In short, they are utterly untrustable. But they are also readable, to an experienced man like myself—and I can learn much from the things they leave unsaid.

But this was not always the case.

So let me recount the Borden deaths. I may as well. I do not see the benefit of avoiding and ignoring the truth. To the
contrary, I’d much rather address the case outright, and shine a light upon it—regardless of what sins of mine may be revealed.

These are the facts.

Sometime late in June of 1892 the Borden family began to experience a prolonged, peculiar set of ailments. I was a close witness to their distress, for I was not merely their doctor but also a nearby neighbor. They lived directly across the street from me and my now-late wife, so I had ample opportunity to observe them over the weeks leading up to the murders on August 4 of that same year.

The first complaints came from Abigail Borden, second wife of Andrew Jackson Borden and stepmother to Andrew’s grown children, Emma and her younger sister, Lizzie, both of whom lived on the premises. Mrs. Borden came to sit in my parlor, having visited for an informal consultation.

I didn’t know her well, but I liked what I knew of her. She was younger than her husband by enough years to remark it, and agreeable in that comfortable way women sometimes achieve when they marry into money and can expect to be cared for.

But on that summer occasion she was out of sorts, restless and pale. As she spoke, she fidgeted constantly with a pendant that hung around her neck from a long silver chain. I remember it so vividly because of the way the light caught it, and though I did not see the item clearly, I could not help but notice how its glassy stone gleamed a rich, ocean green shade that cast bright reflections on the walls.

“Doctor Seabury, it’s a digestive problem. It’s a horrible feeling, at once cold and bubbling. I’m so nauseous, and so light-headed, at times, that I must sit and cover my eyes until the sensation passes.”

“I see. And is anyone else in the family displaying symptoms like these?”

After a brief hesitation she said, “Andrew is, a bit.”

“What are his complaints? Are they precisely like yours, or is there some variation to his discomfort?”

“I couldn’t say.” She shook her head. “He hasn’t spoken about it. I’ve only . . . noticed. As his wife, who shares the same household. You understand.”

“Of course,” I replied. “And what of your stepdaughters?”

Her face darkened and for a moment she quit worrying the pendant. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spoken to either of them lately.”

“Ah. Has there been any significant change in the family diet?”

She shook her head again and said, “No, I don’t believe so.”

I did not press her any further. I already knew what bothered her bowels, though I couldn’t bring it up without prompting denials and offense. So rather than invite confrontation, I said, “Perhaps it’s something seasonal, then. Dyspepsia can arise from almost anything—and rather than leap to alarming conclusions, I honestly think this can be handled with simple, common treatments.”

I offered her some harmless prescriptions, chiefly carbonate of ammonia pills and white bismuth. It wouldn’t hurt, and it might even help.

I did not doubt that she was suffering from indigestion. I only doubted my personal ability to address the root cause thereof.