Maplecroft (37 page)

(He
was right, I think. I knew more than I understood. I knew when he spoke of his Mother that he meant the howling, hungry thing out in the ocean with a voice like chains grinding together, hauling something heavy out of the tide. Hers was the voice of salvage, of dredging. Of something larger and more terrible than a mountain, drawn out of the water foot by foot, by this thing in front of me. I knew Who She was. I knew that’s Who called him. That’s Who was calling us, calling for Her children.
But I was not Her child. Emma was not Her child, either. Nor the doctor, nor anyone else in Fall River, so help me
God
.)

Louder,
I complained, “That doesn’t make any sense.” I wanted his attention returned to me. I needed to take his eyes off my sister, to draw his attention elsewhere. He was creeping so very close . . . hovering in the very air she breathed. Close enough to kiss her.

“Sense is relative.”

“Many things are relative,” I agreed, stepping closer—against every instinct in my body. I wanted to flee, I wanted to scream for Seabury, but he was upstairs. I heard him moving furniture, barricading the door like a fool. Would he trap us all inside? With the monster himself? He must have gone madder than I’d considered, and I had a sickening moment of worry that this was deliberate on his part, that he was working in tandem with the monster now—completely overtaken.

I could not entertain the possibility. I forced it from my mind. If it was true, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

“Why are you here? Who is your mother? Why can’t you leave us alone?”

He fixated on Emma’s face. A snake, charmed by the flute. Or was it the reverse? “
Our
Mother,” he asserted.

“Our mother is dead,” I countered.

“Not
that
one.”

I looked down and saw the cooker’s cupboard. The door was shut. I reached with my foot and opened it . . . quietly. Whether he heard or not, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he did hear me, and didn’t care. He didn’t believe I was any threat to him, or his mysterious mother.

I tiptoed around the cooker and tried not to gaze down to
the rumbling, fizzing liquid within it. He was still a dozen feet away, with a heavy wood table between us. Could I move him a dozen feet? Could Emma?

He faced me again, that chilly, sharp face that was so white it was almost blue.

“You can hear Her, can’t you? She calls us, Emma and me. Just as She spoke to your Nancy.”

I swallowed hard. I breathed, “That isn’t her name.”

“You’re very particular about such things, aren’t you?” He viewed me quizzically.

I nodded hard, and I locked my eyes to his. If I hadn’t, I might have watched Emma ratcheting herself to her feet. She used the wall to brace herself, used her knees to propel herself up, all the way. To the table’s edge, which she grasped with one hand while the other hand felt quietly for a series of vials that were scattered across the top. She was already holding one; she was showing me what it was.

A tiny glass container tinkled when she knocked it over.

Trying to cover the sound, I said quickly: “Names mean things. You changed your own name, didn’t you?”

He appeared confused, but only for a flash. He mouthed a word without speaking it.
Zollicoffris
, I think. “My name has always been . . .”

“Phillip Zollicoffer,” I prompted. Emma was shaky on her feet. She shot me a look that I wished to God I knew how to read—but I couldn’t watch her too closely. I didn’t want him to see that she was upright behind him.

His lips twisted, miming what I’d said. I believe it honestly confused him; he toyed with the shape of it, uncertain of whether it was familiar or foreign in his mouth. He came to a decision. “Close enough,” he said. And then he sounded more sure of
himself as he looked over his shoulder and said to Emma: “You must come with me, you know. She wants to have us both. You were the one who found the specimen; you were the one who saved it from the sun.” He looked back to me and said, “You see? Look, she is standing. Already she is stronger. She is ready and willing, little sister. You must not stand in her way.”

Ready and willing?

When I looked at Emma’s face, her posture, her fierce grip on the vial in her hand . . . it was not readiness or willingness I saw there. It was anger, red-hot and raw. She looked swiftly back and forth between the madman and myself, and for one blazing, awful instant I could not tell who she hated the most.

But I couldn’t watch her, or interrogate her. I had to watch
him
, and while I had his attention, I said, “I won’t let you leave with her. I won’t let you take her away. She’s all I have left. She’s my whole world.”

“It’s not my fault that the feeling isn’t mutual,” he said, and I don’t think he meant to be unkind. If anything, I heard some small note of apology in the observation.

Even so, his words bit me with their truth. He was charming me again . . . not to win my affection, but to keep me from interfering. That charming, charming voice, with those charming, charming eyes . . . except they weren’t charming at all. They were dead inside, just like him.

I shook my head, and water sloshed roughly in my ears. I realized I was still holding my axe, but I’d let it sink. Its head was set upon the floor, and my fingers held it so loosely that I was in danger of dropping it altogether.

No.

I tightened my knuckles to clutch its reassuring handle, and lifted it up.

Emma lifted something up, too. The vial in her hand. She nodded at me, but I frowned at her—I still didn’t understand! What did she want me to do? Was that the toxin? Were those the vials she fiddled and fumbled with? Yes, I thought so. What else could they be?

“I won’t . . . go . . . with you,” she told him.

Zollicoffer was not confused or angry, only insistent when he looked back to her and said, “You will. You must. I would not compel you of my own regard, but Mother compels
me
. This is the order, now. And you will see, it is for the best.”

“To hell with you and your Mother.”

She threw the vial. It hit him without hurting him that I could see, but the stopper had been removed and the contents splashed against his neck—splattering him from chest to cheekbones.

He winced, blinked, and regarded her with bemused astonishment. “What sad little trick have you played, Doctor Jackson?” He reached for his shirt buttons and tugged them, opening the fabric to expose his chest as if to examine it.

“The only one I had,” she spit, and crumpled back to the floor.

He looked to me, as if I might explain.

So I did. In two steps I was past the table, and very near to him. I swung the axe.

He lifted an arm fast enough to deflect the blow, but the axe was heavy and my arm was strong; I caught him across the shoulder, missing most of the dampness she’d spilled upon him. He caught the iron head with his hand. It cut down, not too deep . . .

. . . but he withdrew, clutching at his fingers. The metal had burned him, or shocked him. He let go of the axe and pushed it away, trying to push me with it.

I ducked back, leaned to the side, and took another swing—not a great one, for I was off balance and we were in closer quarters now: between my sister and the table behind me, between the walls and the cooker with its opened cupboard and foul-smelling contents.

My next blow took him closer to the collarbone. It left a hard red dent in his flesh, but it did not cut him. What was he made of, now that he was no longer a man? His skin was tougher than leather!

He laughed at me, and pushed me back when I struck again. He grabbed at the handle this time; he was learning, you see. And he nearly jerked the weapon free, but I held on tightly and I would not let him shake me loose.

I kicked him and the leverage pushed me back, onto the floor on my rear, sliding and picking up splinters, picking up bruises.

“You can’t hurt me, little sister.”

“Yes, she can . . .
now
,” Emma panted.

He ignored her, and tended to me instead. He loomed over me, not quite close enough to hit. It was the most open target I was likely to have . . . his shirt was still open, wet with the contents of Emma’s vial. He was close enough that I could see the skin begin to bubble there, a tiny sizzling frisson that told me he could be hurt after all. That’s what it said, that raw little patch of burning skin:
We have hurt him
. The toxins—Seabury had inoculated us against their deadly effects, but this creature before me,
he
was vulnerable. Why, I did not precisely know. Patterns, I supposed.

But I could kill him. I only needed the strength (and luck, and timing, and divine assistance, surely) to make it happen.

I crawled up to a crouch, braced myself, and I hurled the axe as hard as I could, straight at his head.

My aim wasn’t perfect.

I caught him in the neck, and there—where the toxin was eating away at him, ever so slowly—his skin split beneath the blade.

No one was more astonished than I was, except possibly Emma.

No, not Emma after all. Emma did not see my blow, for she was unconscious. She’d slipped down to the floor, folded over like a ragdoll cast aside. Beneath her face, a dribble of blood and saliva pooled. Her gore-soaked hair was sticking to the floorboards, and her eyes were not quite closed.

But I couldn’t rush to her side. Not yet.

I was transfixed by the axe, even as he pulled it free of his skull and tossed it out of my immediate reach. He clutched the wound it left behind, and blood the color of tar squeezed out from between his fingers.

I grabbed at the table and used it to pull myself up, knocking it over in the process.

But then I lunged at Doctor Phillip Zollicoffer, who had once sent us friendly notes about crustaceans and cephalopods, and had mailed us a box of chocolates shaped like seashells at Christmas, and had murdered countless people, lost his mind, his humanity, his soul—if I could bring myself to believe in souls anymore.

I lunged for him because somehow, he had killed Nance, and in some way he’d killed me, too. What on earth was left for me without her? A sister who loathed me, and a daft doctor who only wanted to help? There was nothing left worth counting.

I lunged for him, and I caught him in the torso, where his skin was peeling, crackling, and turning black. The toxin was still working, still weakening him. I took it as encouragement. I
needed some. I needed something other than the press of his horrible body, and the stink of his skin corroding before my eyes.

Still holding on to his broken head, he pushed back with his shoulder, absorbing some of my momentum—but I shoved him again, with all my weight. Together we fell over the upended table—him backward, me atop him—and he tried to catch himself. He extended his free hand, and landed on it. Not half an inch beside the cooker.

He teetered. The edge so close he must’ve been able to smell the lye and the heat.

He leaned, and tried to roll away.

He released his grip on his head wound, and blood gushed forth . . . or if not blood, then something thicker than that. Whatever weird oil went through his veins, it splattered the room, the table, the floor, and the cooker.

Hastily he scrambled, the long pianist fingers clawing at the floor. The nails breaking, splitting. The fingers bleeding, dragging themselves up and down against the table, which lay on its side and blocked his escape. He scuttled on the floor, half-blinded by the fluids that drained from his head.

He was trapped between the table and the cooker. Between me, and the precious few weapons at my disposal. (The devil and the deep blue sea.)

I braced myself behind the table, planting my shoulder and my knee against it. (My laboratory. My table. My sword, my shield.) I threw all my weight against it, and it scooted—not even a foot. Not even another foot, when I pushed it again.

But it was
enough
.

I forced Zollicoffer back against the cooker’s precipice, and past it, and over the edge.

Hip-first he splashed down, and the lye solution cascaded—
eroding and consuming, sizzling against his skin. It splashed and frothed wildly as he wrestled to escape, but I was behind the table, pushing it atop him, hounding him, hiding from the worst of the deadly acid spray.

Even as he bathed in the cooker, he was not finished yet. With a burst of strength, he seized the table and broke it—more by accident than design, I think. He was flailing; these were his death throes.

(But they were formidable, violent throes, and I knew all too well that I might not survive them.)

Lye sloshed onto the floor, and spattered the room. Without the table’s protective barrier, I got spattered, too, though I scarcely felt it at first.

His hand seized my ankle, and he nearly pulled me into the cooker alongside him. But his energy waned. He only pulled me down, only to the edge, with those bony hands that had lost most of their skin—and were reduced to knuckles and tendons and twiggy phalanges exposed to the air.

He only brought me within kicking range.

I shoved my foot against his face and tried not to see how that face was melting, and how my foot scraped off a rag of skin from his forehead.

He released me. He leaned back, his mouth open to scream. His tongue withered, and writhed.

I dove for the cupboard door, refusing to look back—refusing to watch what I was doing—and I lifted it up, so I could close it down on top of him.

Or I
tried
to close it.

One of his arms and one leg refused to be contained, though the rest of his body thrashed in the cooker’s belly; still, even as it ate him alive, he sought to drown me, too, in the depths of the
machine, if not in the ocean, where he would take Emma. Where somehow he’d taken Nance.

Where we all came from. Where we all were going.

I climbed atop the cupboard door and held it upon him, using what little leverage I had to offer; and when Seabury finally appeared at the top of the steps, crying my name and Emma’s . . . I screamed for him to join me.