Maplecroft (32 page)

Nance
looked up when the lightning flashed again upstairs, though this time I hadn’t heard the thunder that preceded it. It flashed and sizzled, and Maplecroft smelled like ozone and fire. It crackled through the house, the loudest white you’ve ever seen.

The lights went out. The lights came on again.

The cooker was empty. And Nance was
gone.

M
AY
7, 1894

Nance was gone, and I stood there—wondering if my eyes had deceived me, or if I’d finally succumbed to the madness of Fall River, or if perhaps I was simply mistaken about what had occurred.

I tumbled forward—nearly toppling into the cooker myself—but I found no sign of her. The lye and its accompanying chemicals did not simmer or writhe with bubbles as if they’d been disturbed, they only swirled and hummed with the motion of the motor, spinning and whirring, ready to devour anything that might fall. This flytrap of a machine. There in my floor. It was empty, except for the liquids that do its job.

Nance had gone somewhere else.

I flung myself toward the far wall, where the switch
controlled the gaslights—and I twisted it hard enough to break the knob, but the light didn’t brighten and Nance was still gone.

Corner to corner I scanned the room and saw only the usual bits of equipment, paraphernalia, tables, stools, glass vials, books, burners, measuring cups and spoons, scraps of notepaper, lists of trials and errors. In the corner, a broom. Against the wall, my axe. No, not the axe after all, for it was upstairs. I hadn’t known she’d be coming down here again, so I hadn’t brought it.

I’d been so afraid for her that I’d forgotten to arm myself.

“Lizbeth.” Doctor Seabury called to me, and I was startled—I’d looked right past him. He was there, but I hadn’t noticed him. You see? Such things are possible after all.

“She
can’t
be gone,” I insisted to him, not answering his summons except to give him some indication that yes, I was still in possession of my senses. “There’s no way out of the basement except up the stairs, and out the exterior cellar doors, but they’re locked.” I could see the barred fastener from where I stood. It had not been disturbed. “Did she . . . did you . . . did she push past you? Shove you aside?” It didn’t hurt to ask.

“No,” he told me gently. “No, Lizbeth. We lost her.”

Exasperated, I spit—“Through the walls? Like some kind of ghost?”

“Through the walls, past them—I surely don’t know and can’t say. But she’s left this place.”

I clapped my hands over my mouth, then changed my mind and pressed them over my breasts instead. Holding myself down. Holding my horror inside, so I did not scream it out. Quietly, with only what little whispered breath I could spare—lest it all fly forth at once—I said, “He was telling her to do something awful to us. To you, me, and Emma. She was fighting him. That’s what she meant.”

“That’s one reading of the situation,” he replied, more coldly than necessary, in my opinion.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense!” I shouted back at him. Not shouting was too hard.

“Sense has long ago gone out the window here, my dear. She’s gone. That’s the main thing. She neither did anything awful to us, nor did she fling herself into the cooker—that’s all we know for certain.”

“Then we have to go looking for her!”

Now he was exasperated with me; it showed in his eyes. He tried to steady his voice, to lend at least one of us some sense of calm or control. “Lizbeth, if she is trying to protect you by leaving . . . would you undo her efforts by chasing her?”

“Yes!” He was right. Sense had gone out the window, or perhaps out through the walls, like a ghost.

I pushed past him, since she had not. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, noisy as a horse on a boardwalk.

She
had
to be out there somewhere. I ignored Emma, who did her best to get my attention, wondering what was going on; I saw her standing by the landing in the foyer, holding the stair rail for support. Amazing how she can stand, walk, and even yell when she feels motivated enough. Amazing how that’s always when I’m in the middle of something important.

I left her where she was.

The doctor could fill her in, or help her out, or whatever it was she required on that occasion. I had problems of my own. I had to go find Nance.

I grabbed my axe as I dashed out the door, and I carried it around the side of the house in the dark—no, in the intermittent light, flashed from above, cracking the clouds apart like eggs.

It was almost enough to see quite clearly, tumbling from corner
to corner across the sky. Flickering, sometimes, unlike the flash one automatically thinks of when one considers lightning. Farther south, I think they call it “heat lightning,” though what that means—and what difference there might be—I haven’t any idea.

Behind the house I went, determined to see if the cellar door had been breached, and to double-check that I had not been distracted by madness downstairs—but no. It remained stubbornly affixed, and locked from within as I knew it must be.

My heart no longer beat; it clenched and unclenched behind my ribs, so tightly, so forcefully, that I almost felt I couldn’t breathe.

Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Not just the hot-sparkle chasing and crashing of the light in the clouds, or the roll of thunder—one minute hesitant and shaky, the next a clattering godlike gong that shook the whole town. No, not just that.
Everything
.

Nance was gone, and I had to find her.

My lover was alive again, running again. Moving and speaking, as I’d begun to fear I’d never see again. She was herself again, if somewhat changed—not hideously, no. Not like the other people so afflicted with the sickness and insanity. No, she was still her own beautiful self: tall and strong, capable and kind, quick and funny, and sharp and loving.

I stood still and panted, making some halfhearted effort to stop gasping and start breathing normally, despite the cinch of my undergarments objecting to every deeply drawn lungful of air. Where was there to go? Fall River sat between the ocean and the woods.

Between the two, she’d go find the ocean.

I knew it in my soul, and the knowing made me weak with dread. It’s as Emma and her Darwinian colleagues suggest, isn’t
it? All life emerging, cell by cell, fin to foot, from the ocean—to form a bipedal ape that walks and talks and breathes, and creates poetry and cities and gods.

Can
it be that ugly and easy?

We crawled primordial from the water, our grand-ancestors times a million generations; we escaped the tides, the sharks, and the leviathans of the deep, only to find ourselves on land—where we became the things we’d sought to escape, and we invented gods to blame. Not gods of the ocean, for we’d been to the ocean, and seen that the water was empty of the divine. Not gods of the earth, for we have walked upon the dirt, and we are alone here.

So we install our gods in the sky, because we haven’t yet eliminated the firmament as a possibility.

Next, I suppose, we’ll send them into space—where I expect they will live a very long time indeed, for it shall take us another million generations of descendants to reach them, and learn that they are projections of light and story, cast into the heavens by us alone. And we will be alone again (unless by then, we discover some more distant place in which to hide our image).

Over and over again, we lift God out of our reach. Over and over, push Him beyond our grasp, yet still we stretch out our fingers and seek to touch Him.

But find nothing.

If
Nance had gone to the ocean, I would go to the ocean, too.

I would chase her there, to the shore. To the pier, I supposed—though why I would leap to this conclusion, I do not know. Call it instinct, or call it that bond that joins humans when they have shared flesh, and held one another’s bones. Call it dumb luck if you like.

If there are no gods, there should be luck, at least.

And if there are gods after all, perhaps we should not struggle so hard to get their attention, if this is the attention they would lavish upon us.

To
the shore, then.

I ran the whole way, clutching my axe by the middle of its handle to keep it from swinging; I pushed my feet forward, running below the ever-churning, ever-rolling, ever-noisy sky and wondering if there would be any rain at all—for none had fallen yet. No sprinkles, no deluge. Only the whisper-sharp tang of lightning, that scorched electrical smell that comes before a strike.

But none of the lightning touched me. It only showed me the way, all the way down to the water where the pier was located, and where the Hamilton family once had a shop, and where I would push my sister in her wheeled chair, so that she could climb out and sit or lie on the rocks and warm her body on the sunnier days. Pretending we were taking a holiday someplace nice, where no one knew who we were. Chatting about the tide pools. Poking sticks into holes in the sand, and finding strange samples there—specimens to discuss or to send by post to monsters in other towns.

A hard, sharp shout of light—and I saw her, or I thought I did. More importantly, I
believed
I did—and I screamed her name at the top of my lungs, even though nothing could’ve heard me over the celestial furor, the thunder coming so fast, one roll after another. It’d come to sound like a low, magnificent hum not merely above me, but around me. Inside me.

I almost stopped hearing it.

I almost couldn’t hear my own voice, crying for Nance.

But
she
did. I’m certain she did—and I’m certain it was her,
too. I saw her in silhouette, and then in a too-white flicker when she faced me, and her skin was as bright as a shark’s belly. Her face was flat and featureless, and it’s true that I was some distance away, but I could not make out so much as a pair of dark holes where her eyes must have been, or the horizontal slash of her mouth. She faced me, but didn’t see me. She was being erased.

I tried her name again, but this time the phantasm turned its head and vanished—or rather, when the next stroke of lightning cut the darkness a moment later, it was gone.
She
was gone.

I ran toward the spot where last I saw her; I was still carrying the axe, though I scarcely felt the weight of it. I felt only the wind, tearing at my dress and dragging at my hair; I felt only the misery and fear of knowing Nance was there, but not there.

I reached the edge of the street, and there was nowhere left to go except for the pier immediately before me, or onto the naked, jutting rocks that flanked it on either side. They clustered between the water and the sand, monuments of basalt and granite or whatever stony barriers the ocean best prefers when it throws up walls to keep us out.

I did not shriek for Nance again, because it was clear now that even if she caught my voice, even if she remembered her name and recognized it—and recognized me, and knew that I loved her—it was not enough to hold her here. My voice was not enough to make her stay.

I scanned the pier, the large rows of rocks that stood huddled like soldiers in poor formation. I checked the street behind me and the trees, houses, and merchant stalls back behind that.

Nothing. No one.

For all I knew, I was the only person alive in Fall River.

The light-frosted sky told me nothing, until I heard some strange new sound, a howling not drawn from the wind scraping
against the unsettled waves. Whatever storm battered Fall River, it did not make this cry—this unearthly, inhuman, unlikely, and unbelievable wail that came from . . . below or maybe
beyond
the water, I think. It came from the ocean, off in the distance—this high-pitched groan that carried on the storm the undercurrents of a creak, a squeal, like a great door opening or a lion’s mouth stretching into a yawn.

It was a living cry; that’s what I mean to say. Not the insensate noise of a ship leaning or a tree beginning to break; it was a sound made on purpose, by something that wished to be heard. Yet it must also be said that this sound was mechanical in nature—or its underpinnings seemed that way to me. I heard chains, unspooling. Metal on metal. Rusted cogs objecting to the thought of being turned, but turning nonetheless.

I did not have long to muse about the sound’s nature or origins, for I saw her again.

Only for a flicker, for the briefest shaved moment of a second.

On the rocks, to the left. On the tumbled boulders worn smooth and treacherous by the tide, moving across them as easily as Christ must have walked upon the sea. She moved steadily, but the motion of her limbs was not natural—her bare skin gleaming and wet; she looked like she had too many limbs, clinging and rattling, crablike, across the stones. (She had a center that did not move, only dangled between clicking, clattering, clawing appendages that gripped the uneven terrain and navigated it soundly, for all their strangeness.)

I tried her name again, but without any force this time. She wasn’t listening to me. She was listening to the cry that rose up out of the waves, and I wondered if this was the cry of Zollicoffer—of the monster who hounded us, and who must have surely arrived in Fall River by now.

Had he met us here? Now? Finally?

But no, that couldn’t be right. The mad professor would be coming by land. Whatever wet god summoned Nance from the Atlantic, this must be what called to him, too. The monster that calls to monster. The evil so great that it draws all other evil like a lodestone.

(Is this what we fled, when we left the ocean? Did we grow legs so we could run away?)

Somewhere in the back of my head, I wondered if Zollicoffer hadn’t already arrived at Maplecroft. He would stop there first, wouldn’t he? He might be there already.

But there was no turning around now. I’d picked my path, and this is where it led me—after Nance, down to the water. Onto the immense, uneven boulders that keep watch over the place where the water meets the shore.

I slipped and stumbled, for my shoes were not made to prance across boulders wet with tide and the ocean spray. I was not dressed for beachcombing or swimming; I was not ready to fight the slick stones for handholds, so I crawled gracelessly across them, between them, through them—always toward Nance, who was moving toward the waves.

I lost my footing, or my handing. I lost something, anyway.

I tumbled down into a small valley, a damp, sandy stretch between two stones, and the spot was filled with water up to my knees. My feet sank and struggled, and I shoved my hands against the boulders on either side of me. I dragged myself forward.

The sky above me still flickered violently with the lightning that never struck, and only scattered.

I had no idea where I was, or how I’d find my way past the rocks and out to the open water. I didn’t know where Nance was, and she was my guiding light. Perhaps I’d die down there
between the stones, and turn up bleached and dead when the waves went back out again.

It would not have been the worst of all outcomes.

But that wasn’t what happened.