Maplecroft (35 page)

M
AY
7, 1894

I refused to believe that Lizzie had drowned, though she looked drowned enough when I hauled her onto the pier. She’s a little thing, but even little things are heavy as stones when wet, even when they don’t fight you.

I have always been a good swimmer—and I’ve always enjoyed it—but I am older now, and not as strong as I once was.

I do not know what she saw, when she leaped off the tall rocks and went headlong into the water. Nance, I must assume. I didn’t see her, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.

I wished for more light and more time, but all I had was the thundering sky and the flashing, inconstant illumination of the lightning that never quite struck; and all I had was the time it took Lizzie to be sucked out away from the rocks, to the edge of
the pier. I pulled off my coat as I ran, kicked off my shoes before I jumped, dove into the ocean, and drew myself toward the last place I’d seen her.

She hadn’t gone far. I felt her before I saw her.

I caught her by the head—my fingers brushing what felt like seaweed. I wrenched her upright by a great tangle of her hair, out of the water, and I towed her back to the ladder, then hauled her up it.

She was so full of water.

The ocean poured out from her nose and mouth, and when I thought she couldn’t possibly give up another drop, I sat her upright and squeezed her from behind. My arms were better leverage that way; and then, yes, more fluid spilled out from her mouth, so it must have been the right thing to do. Finally, I laid her back down again and checked her eyes. They had rolled back, showing too much white . . . but her lashes flickered, bucking against my probing fingers, and I was encouraged.

“Lizbeth!” I shouted her preferred name, and I slapped at her cheeks and gave up on the preferred nonsense and went for the more familiar. “Lizzie, answer me! You must answer me!”

She did answer—with a terrific intake of breath that transformed into ferocious coughing. She pulled away from me, and on her hands and knees she coughed up more, and then vomited, and then finally breathed. It was uneven, damaged breathing; the air raked back and forth out of her chest, but she was
breathing
.

“Where’s . . .” She gargled the word.

“Nance is gone,” I told her bluntly. Now was not the time for false reassurances or platitudes. “And Zollicoffer is coming. He’s coming to Maplecroft, coming for your sister,” I added, uncertain if that would spur her to action or give her pause. Their relationship had so clearly become . . . complicated. The
Problem complicated it. Nance complicated it. For that matter, maybe I did, too.

(As
I’d fled the house, I wondered if I was making the wrong choice—picking the wrong sister to save, if I had to choose just one. What a terrible choice, not even spur of the moment. Not even a second to split, and I was forced to decide, regardless.

What was I to do?

Well, Lizzie ran, so I chased her. As useless and direct as a dog running after a cart, that’s what I did.)

The
sky was positively screaming, announcing the mad doctor’s imminent visit . . . and the ocean howled it, too. I heard the water moaning, chanting a soulful tune. There was music to it, I swear. Music so slow and loud that it takes a long stretch of listening before you’d even recognize it as such. At first you’d think it was something like wind, roaring through a jagged cave. At first you’d think it might be a shout, offered over the ocean, its message garbled and lost. But if you listened, you’d know. Even if you didn’t listen, it’d occur to you eventually . . . you couldn’t escape it. You couldn’t
not
hear it.

I held Lizzie by the shoulders as she hacked up the last of everything she’d swallowed. “Do you hear me?” I asked.

She nodded without looking at me, her hair spilling down to the ground, tangled and wet. “Emma,” she said.

I was surprised. I’d expected her lover’s name first, but maybe she believed me when I said the girl was gone; or maybe she knew something I didn’t. Maybe she caught whatever she’d been chasing, and now she knew the loss for certain.

“Help me up,” she said.

I did.

She used both hands to smooth her hair away from her face. “My axe,” she said.

“I don’t know where it is. I’m sorry. I didn’t see where you dropped it.”

But she pointed, back at the ground near the edge of the rocks. Yes, there it was—the oft-polished blade glittered in the light of the frantic sky. “I need it,” she said, and she began to stagger toward it. Her strength was waning; small wonder, considering the mile-long run to the rocky shore, and her subsequent swim.

But she picked up speed as she stomped down the pier, her footsteps echoing loudly even against the thunder, and the cry of the ocean (if indeed it was the ocean, and not something worse). I followed her, not because I couldn’t outpace her—she was still weak from her ordeal, or weaker than usual, if I must degrade her strength—but because I was ready to catch her if she stumbled or fell. I’d saved her; now I had to protect her. Now I was responsible for her. Isn’t that the way of philosophy?

I patted at my chest for my gun, but it was gone. I’d lost it in the water, or somewhere along the way. “My gun!” I exclaimed, almost tripping at the end of the wooden walkway. I collected myself and arrived at Lizzie’s side as she retrieved her weapon of choice. So one of us was armed, and there was that much on our side.

“When we get back to Maplecroft,” she wheezed, “you can have my father’s.”

“Your father’s?”

“His gun. Liquor cabinet, in the parlor. Top drawer,” she said. She picked up the axe and flipped it expertly, feeling for the familiar move and sway of its weight with more grace and better precision than the most experienced of lumberjacks. It was almost lovely, the way she turned it between her hands—almost divine, how the light sparked off it and bounded back into the sky.

I was wrong. She wasn’t weakened at all.

I do not know what fueled her beyond that point of near death, into vigorous rebellion. Pure willpower? Terror? Curiosity? Oh, but I hoped it was that simple.

She turned to me, and stepped so close that I could feel her breath in the hollow of my throat. Her gaze was dark and deadly, even though her eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, and vomit-water clouded the front of her dress.

She said, “He’s here.”

I nodded. “Let’s go.”

Together, we set off—not at top speed, but at a steady pace. Did I say it was a mile to Maplecroft? A little less than that, I think; but in the dark, after such an evening of exertion, an outright run was more than either of us could manage.

(It’s more than I could’ve managed. I do not know about her, since I do not know what kept her moving. I did not want to consider that she was tainted somehow, too, granted extra strength, or a touch of madness, like the rest of them. I wonder if she wondered it about me. Fine then. We’re all mad, maybe. No one will escape the Problem. Nothing but consensus will have the final say.)

Anyway
we hurried as best we could, and as we retreated to the big house I tried to formulate some plan. “When we get there,” I gasped, timing my words between footfalls, trying to lay them down between the crackling, fracturing heavens and all their requisite chatter. “We should . . .”

“Yes?” she said, not looking back. She still outpaced me. She was younger, after all. And I was glad she looked steadier now than when I’d first pulled her from the water; I was no longer certain I could catch her if she fell. I wasn’t sure from one
step to the next, for the exhaustion and confusion were at war with my excitement, and I was light-headed from the turbulence of it all.

“The toxins,” I told her. “Use the toxins against the professor.”

“You still think it will help?”

“It can’t hurt to try,” I insisted, my chest burning from the running and talking in tandem. This was what old age felt like. Old age and death: remembering how it felt to run without pain and the tightening lungs, but unable to do so anymore.

“The globulins . . . they worked on Nance.” She nodded, but not to me. Still facing forward, toward the house, toward our fate—whatever it might turn out to be. “She did not go mad. She awoke. She did not kill us all.”

A rather loose definition of success, but she wasn’t wrong—and given the circumstances, I’d cling to anything, even a margin so slim as that one. Perhaps
someone
would make it out alive.

“But the toxins, not the globulins, they are . . .” I struggled to catch my breath. “Deadly. To us, maybe to them.”

“I know. You told me.”

I honestly could not recall having done so. I remembered
thinking
about telling her, and sorting out the facts, and working to assemble the loose pieces of this terrible puzzle. I remembered telling Emma. Or I thought I remembered. I might well have been wrong.

I am slipping.

The thought whisked through my mind. My feet were still sound. My footing was sound. The ground was not wet, for it had not actually rained at all—the sky’s noisy protests be damned, it was only the squishing of my wet socks in wet shoes. I was running, and we were nearly upon Maplecroft, and my
legs felt weak but I was still upright, still determined. But I was slipping all the same, and cursed to be aware of it. A stupider man might not have noticed. Someone more inclined to self-deception might never have considered it.

Regardless, there it was. A loosening grasp on sanity. One finger at a time giving up, letting go.

But I had no time to confront it, not then and there, when the house loomed up out of the darkness before us.

I say “loomed” as if it were a monster, and it wasn’t; but the jagged, pretty, gingerbready shape loomed despite itself. A large, lovely place, broad and welcoming. A beautiful house, shrouded in darkness . . . and then, in flashes of light that wasn’t lightning—illuminated and awful. The brilliant flickers showed the whole thing in stark shadow, black against white, and then the reverse . . . so quickly that the impression was burned on my retinas, making the effect all the stranger, every time I blinked.

“Doctor!” The word was strong and sharp, fired like a bullet.

Immediately, I knew why.

I announced, “I see them!” For I saw them, and it was enough to stop my hammering heart.

Crawling around the house like spiders, their spindly white hands clutching at the windowsills, the stairs, the bricks, the shrubs. Tramping on the roses, marching through the bushes. I saw half a dozen at a hasty count, but there must have been more around the rear of the house, or the sides we could not see. They were battering the place, but not entering it . . . as if some strange boundary or supernatural order prevented them.

One
by one they looked away from the house, and they stared at us with hateful, hungry eyes that were pale and white. Fish eyes. Watery eyes. Eyes with hate, but not intelligence—not the
clever, conniving eyes of a cephalopod, or the serious squint of a seal. These eyes were cold and flat like a shark’s, but that is unfair. A shark’s eyes were only black and hungry. They were not shrouded, and full of malice.

One by one the creatures peeled themselves away from the mansion, their attention drawn to us. Moths, and we were the flame. All but two, who remained at the front door on all fours, padding back and forth, their backs arched and their fingers pointed, they slathered and stalked.

The front door was open. It took me a few seconds to notice. It was open, but still they paced before it, unable or unwilling to enter.

I was confident that I had closed and locked the door behind me. It was the last sane, deliberate act I performed before leaving the house, in fierce pursuit of the younger Borden sister—leaving the elder one behind. Therefore, something or someone had opened it. Something or someone had gone inside, for surely Emma lacked the strength or the stupidity to leave it ajar.

“Lizzie,” I breathed, drawing up to a halt.

She slowed to a sure-footed walk but did not stop. She adjusted her axe, twisting it back and forth between her hands. She said, “Stay with me.”

Stay with her? I supposed there wasn’t much choice.

She was armed and I was not—though I spent a frantic moment wondering if I shouldn’t take the axe away from her and wield it myself. But no, that would not do, if for no other reason than that I probably couldn’t. She might not leave me my hands. Or my life.

She was as single-minded as the creatures that stalked her porch.

I stayed close behind her as commanded, but I remained far
enough back that she was unlikely to strike me—which was good, because the first creature reached her and she whipped the axe around, catching it in the head. Splitting it like a melon. Not even looking at it, not even checking to see if it was down and would stay that way . . . she moved onward, keeping her eyes on the front door.

“They’ll follow us inside . . . ?” I meant to suggest, and ended up asking, with a pitiful question mark affixed to the end.

“They won’t.”

She knew something that I didn’t. And not for the first time, either.

We were drawing nearer and nearer to the house. More and more of the things were crawling into the yard, drawn by us. Having seen the one thing, the one time, all those nights ago when I first came to understand the mystery of this place . . . that was bad enough. This was a nightmare in motion, and God help me, we were all of us awake.

“Have you ever seen this many?” I asked her.

“No.”

“They come from the water, don’t they?” I was jogging again to keep up with her, and my breathing was raspy, not quite in her ear.

“I think so.”

“That’s why . . . that’s why the toxin . . . the tetanus . . . your axe,” I tried to tell her, but I could no longer talk and run at the same time. I had not enough strength to do both.

This
is what I meant to tell her: the
tetani
bacteria cannot survive in the water—it needs open air to thrive. These creatures that she fells with her axe like so many trees . . . they never encounter the infection in their native environment, only on the land, here, where it lives so abundantly in the soil and in the
flesh of our land-dwelling creatures, and heaven knows where else (or maybe heaven doesn’t). They are vulnerable here. They are vulnerable to her axe. To us. They are not indomitable. (But neither are we.)