Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  She told me, “Yes, that’s all he does now. It’s always been his favorite, you know—something he does when he’s bored, or taking a moment from working the till or stitching up nets.”

  I crooked my chin toward the water. “The whole town knows to look for him there, out on the bay.”

  “More now than ever. It’s strange,” she said, leaning forward and crossing her arms on the counter. “And I don’t like it.”

  Uncertain of what, precisely, she did not like, I indicated the collection at the barrel by the door. “But he’s doing a very fine job.”

  “Better than fine, or worse. I can scarcely get his attention for any other task. And I know,” she said with a shake of her head, beating me to my instinctive argument. “He’s a lad still, and lads behave oddly without any prompting. But this has gone on for some time, and it’s becoming more and more of a problem by the day.”

  I sighed and set my bag down on the counter beside her. “Perhaps you’d better begin at the beginning. What exactly is he doing that worries you? Apart from overfilling the stock barrel, which I can see for myself.”

  She exhaled deeply and her chest sagged, squeezing an abundance of bosom forward, over her arms. “It began a month or two ago. First he was having a hard time with the nets—he wasn’t paying attention, and he was dropping stitches, tying them into the wrong kinds of knots. When he was finished with a net, it wouldn’t have held anything. It wouldn’t even spread for the throwing. I watched him work, and I tell you, his mind was elsewhere.”

  “Again,” I said, “a common complaint when it comes to young men.”

  “But you should’ve seen it—the look in his eyes: There wasn’t one. Thought it was in my imagination, I did, but no . . . I’m sure of that now. Over time it’s gone from a boyish lack of attention to something . . . something I can hardly bear. Sometimes when he looks at me, he looks right through me. He doesn’t see me! He doesn’t hear me.”

  “He isn’t listening?”

  “I know. This, too—it sounds like a boy being a boy, but—” She stopped herself, as if she’d meant to tell me one thing, and changed her mind, offering me another thought instead. “He’s listening, but not to me. He’s listening to something else.”

  I frowned, and she frowned, too. Then she heaved her torso up from the counter and came to stand beside me. She laid a hand on my elbow and guided me to the window beside the front door. Its glass was scummed by years of salted air, but I rubbed the back of my hand to shine one corner of a pane, and I could see all the way to the coastline beyond the edge of the road, perhaps a hundred yards away.

  “Watch him,” she murmured, standing very close beside me. Her breath was low and rushed, as if she’d been running and was pretending otherwise. “Look at him, and you tell me what he’s listening to.”

  I watched as she’d commanded. The details were unclear; I was too far away to see much more than a long-limbed fellow picking around on the rocks, his face pointed down and his dark, wild hair billowing in the ocean air that gusted off the inrushing tide. At first I saw nothing remarkable, merely the same lad I knew on sight, in his natural habitat, performing his usual task.

  But the longer I looked, the odder it seemed—and it was nothing I could immediately pinpoint. I stared. And I thought I saw an unusual jerkiness to his movements. He lacked his usual grace, the ordinary leaping, climbing, and leaning that typically characterized his hunts. He moved more heavily, and slowly, too. He did not jump from rock to rock, but he slid down one and scaled the next. His hands hung from his arms like dead things, or like whole things without fingers. They were flat and immobile, like fish at a market stand.

  “He’s listening,” his godmother breathed. “Look at him. He’s listening.”

  Yes, he was. I could tell it from the tilt of his head; every time he turned or pivoted, every time he changed rocks or changed directions—dipping down to the same level and poking through the sand. No matter which way he turned, the crook of his neck aimed his head at the ocean.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Hamilton urged, “you could have a word with him. Talk to him, please, Doctor. I’d feel better knowing you’d looked him up and down, even if you decide there’s nothing amiss, or nothing you can do.”

  As I stood there, peering through the small, clear square of windowpane with Felicity Hamilton’s labored breathing puffing against the back of my neck, I would have rather done anything else than to go talk to young Matthew. I wanted to turn, wish the woman a good day, and make an excuse or apology regarding some fictional patient requiring my immediate services.

  But I did not. I gathered up my scraps of inner fortitude and forced a smile upon Mrs. Hamilton as I said, “Very well. I’ll do just that.”

  She opened the door and saw me out, and when I looked over my shoulder she was still there, watching through the spot I’d smudged to clarity on her window, her nervous eyes darting back and forth between me and her ward.

  I took a deep breath.

  This was a simple thing—likely the simplest task I’d be asked to perform all day—and it should not have repulsed me so. On countless brief, perfunctory, casual occasions through the years, I’d exchanged more than a handful of words with the fellow out there on the rocks. That lad over there, picking his way between the tide-washed boulders and always moving so that his head was cocked toward the Atlantic . . . he was no stranger. I’d always known him to be the pleasant sort, relatively eager to please and optimistic that any errand might earn him an extra penny for his trouble.

  So why did I feel such dread as I slowly trudged toward him? He’s only a boy, I told myself. A simple truth, and one so obvious that it scarcely needed any mention. What else would he be? What was I so afraid of?

  I approached him, stepping along the walkway as long as I could, and then only tiptoeing off the planks and onto the sand. I made a show of wanting to keep my shoes clean. It was only a show, but it allowed me to keep some distance—and it kept me off the rocks. I’m not as young as I once was, and I no longer cared to scamper along the boulders like some schoolchild. And this was one more thing I told myself, for show.

  “Matthew?” I called.

  I stood facing him, my feet half in the wet-packed sand, my toes jostling against the polished pebbles that collected up against the spot where the ocean ended. The wind came up fierce, whipping my coat and nearly stealing my hat. I held the coat shut with one hand and held my hat in place with the other, and I called out again, in case the wind had carried away my first attempt.

  “Matthew?” I said it more loudly this time.

  He stopped scanning the cracks between the rocks and allowed himself to slide down the slippery, shining-dark slope of a boulder the size of a pony; but he didn’t meet my eyes and he didn’t approach. He only stood there, waiting for heaven knew what, swaying against the buffeting wind.

  “Matthew,” I tried again. “Dear lad, would you come over here for a moment, off the beach? I was wondering if . . . if I could talk to you. I wanted to . . . to ask you . . .”

  He lifted his head to look at me, almost; but there was that tilt—that alarming, off-kilter tilt that kept his attention always to the open ocean beyond the rocks.

  My brain scavenged frantically for logical, reasonable things to say about Matthew. I wondered if he didn’t have some kind of ear problem. He might’ve had an infection, or a fluid buildup, or some other kind of ailment residing therein, that seemed to so harshly alter his equilibrium.

  “Matthew?”

  He nodded, which seemed an odd response—as if he were confirming that yes, he was in fact Matthew. Ridiculous. Of course I knew that. And he knew I knew it. What peculiar behavior was this, between two citizens who’d been acquainted for better than fifteen years?

  “Matthew, could you come here, please?”

  If someone had held me at gunpoint, I could not have explained why I was so reluctant to venture any farther onto the sand. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, and the peb
bles banked around the edges of the leather soles. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to venture any closer to the rushing, rumbling waves beyond the rocks.

  Matthew only looked at me, or through me—past me, like he was looking hard at something just behind me. So effective was this gaze that I looked back to make sure I wasn’t blocking his view of something more interesting. But no. There was nothing behind me but the usual piers, shopfronts, passersby, and preening white gulls.

  When I had finished double-checking and once I’d made myself certain that Matthew was, more or less, looking at me—I met his eyes again.

  I shuddered. I took half a step’s retreat that almost sent me falling over the edge of the walkway planks, and I corrected myself in time to keep from harm. But I flailed. And when I had restored my body’s balance I clutched my coat more tightly across my chest. I released my hat, trusting it to remain affixed—or not caring if it abandoned me.

  The young man was giving me that look, and it was a blinkless look that stared but saw nothing, and I’d seen it before. I knew that mindless set of the eyes and then, as the awkward moment stretched itself out long between us, I knew the cast of his skin. I thought of eggs, peeled and pickled in a pantry jar. I imagined sourdough beginning to turn too sour; I pondered the waterlogged flesh of the drowned.

  And I remembered Abigail Borden.

  The similarity shocked me, though the boy was clearly in some stage of whatever had overcome Mrs. Borden. Or . . . well. It’s hard to phrase what I mean. She died by an axe; but something had been draining her, or sickening her, prior to her death. I can admit that now. I must admit that now.

  It took me a moment to realize I was holding my breath.

  I let it out with a whistle and a gulp.

  What could I say? I had nothing to suggest, offer, or declare. The unhinged set of the boy’s jaw, the tone of his skin, the slack and loose look of his face . . . I’d seen it before, as certainly as I’d seen typhoid shared from person to person in a battle camp.

  A word bubbled to the surface of my murky thoughts.

  “Symptoms.” I said it aloud, letting the syllables slip out past my chilled, unhappy lips. The boy was displaying symptoms—of that I was certain.

  But my God, symptoms of what?

  I tipped my hat in his general direction, which caused him to budge not in the slightest. So I turned on my heel and left, trying hard not to hurry—lest it look like I was running away.

  When I reached my home I shut myself inside it, leaning my back against the door as if I could hold at bay any contagion that the boy might’ve breathed toward me. It was ridiculous—perfectly ridiculous, and I knew it. But I also knew it was not my imagination that the two Fall River residents, Abigail Borden and Matthew Granger, were somehow connected.

  The skin. The eyes. The lumbering, clumsy look—as if they lacked full control of their faculties, or their senses were somehow dulled. Matthew’s condition was not yet as severe as Abigail’s had become, but I could see it in his face. I could see it in his shambling movements. A more severe case of the Borden problem was working its way into his body, into his blood.

  I fastened the front door with more precision than was necessary, and dashed upstairs to my office, where I kept notes, files, paperwork. Things to remind myself of patient histories, and records that might assist authorities in case of a plague.

  In Europe, physicians and civil servants have been tracking disease outbreaks for decades, beginning with the cholera epidemics in London. Records compiled by doctors, clergymen, postmen, and others have proven invaluable to the study of how sickness spreads, and my own interest in the subject had prompted me to collect such day-to-day details and write them down. I’d begun perhaps five years before, recording basic information and keeping it in files after reading about the efforts of a Dublin doctor to do the same in the slums of that city. I had no slums for the studying, but I had Fall River and I knew its population.

  I didn’t honestly believe that any of my short notations would ever be as important as London’s Ghost Map. No, certainly not. But I liked to think that one day my notes might benefit some researcher, somewhere.

  My drawers and files had fallen into disarray, relative to how neatly they were kept when my wife was alive. Such is the way of things, all order passing into chaos, given time enough. But even so, I soon found what I was looking for: a few sheets of paper stuffed into a folder, labeled “Ab. Bord.”—to distinguish her from Andrew but to preserve some measure of anonymity for the families whose well-being I observed.

  • • •

  (Privately, I assumed that any serious researcher would have no difficulty teasing out the particulars of my patients; but I liked to think that my little abbreviations would at least give me some protection, if any of those patients were to learn of my notes and take objection to them.)

  • • •

  My notes frustrated me. They were incomplete, and woefully so—through no one’s fault but my own.

  Upon my first visits with Abigail Borden, I had recorded everything from her temperature to her breathing rate, but as her condition deteriorated . . . it’s as I said before. I was paying less and less attention, for I was distracted by the family drama that played out across the street.

  I was deeply annoyed because the notes revealed that I’d become complacent and lazy, and that I have not always performed my job to the best of my ability.

  When did that begin? When did I go from the ideals and optimism, and the intent engagement of youth, to the apathy of age?

  I’m not so old yet as to be feeble or infirm. I’m scarcely in my sixties, and though my hair goes whiter by the year, I still feel like a healthy man with a sturdy constitution.

  Granted, men with sturdy constitutions and feelings of health drop dead every day, and this should sober me. But it sobers me less than the awareness that I’m slipping, in my way. Maybe not my strength of body, but strength of character—or professional responsibility.

  Disgusted, I stuffed the notes back into their sleeve. They told me nothing, and they would never tell anyone anything. I’d done too poor a job. I’d done nothing more than waste my time, and the time of any future readers who might stumble across my pitiful recollections.

  On second thought, I decided I could spare one of us, at least.

  I reached into the drawer and pulled out everything I could carry, and then I opened the next drawer and retrieved its contents, too. Everything that would fit in my arms I hauled downstairs, over to the fireplace—which had burned down low due to inattention. But it blazed bright when the first loose leaves of paper went over the grate and into the coals.

  I’d wasted enough, and I would waste no more. No more time, no more vainglorious scribbling for posterity, serving nothing and no one.

  And while my collection of trifles burned, I sat at my writing desk and I began to record in earnest every single thing—every impression, every suspicion, and every half-recalled idea—I’d ever known about Abigail Borden and Matthew Granger.

  I CROSS THE MAGPIE, THE MAGPIE CROSSES ME

  Phillip Zollicoffer, Professor of Biology, Miskatonic University

  SEPTEMBER 22, 1893

  The question is not “What is wrong?”

  A closer query would be “What is different?” or “What is changing?”

  Something is changing. Something is shifting, or slipping. I want to ask if I’m losing my mind, but who would answer? How on earth can I step outside my brain and ask it to evaluate, with all fairness, its effectiveness as a body-governing device?

  It might only lie to me. How would I know?

  And I can’t rely upon the opinions of my peers; this much is certain. They’ve been all too happy for all too many years, calling me daft. They’ll be no help at all, now that the question has seriously reared itself.

  Then again, I don’t want any help.

  I’m feeling quite well, if occasionally light-headed. I don’t believe I’m suffering from a
ny illness or cancerous complaint. Nothing more dire than a peculiar clarity at times, and a warm resonance at others.

  The resonance is difficult to describe. It tugs at me, an intermittent sensation as if I’m being lured. No, invited. Or even more precisely, welcomed. I’m not yet certain what brings this on, though I’m considering a series of experiments. The resonance is not quite repeatable at my command, but it’s consistent enough to call a symptom. I will prod at it like a soreness in a tooth, pinpointing the trouble with my tongue until I know where the problem lies.

  But there I go again, calling it something it’s not.

  This is no problem. This is only a condition, and a not altogether unpleasant one. I mentioned the clarity, did I not? I’m remembering things with greater sharpness, more vividly, with more significant contrast around all the edges. Something unusual is at work. I’m confident of that if nothing else.

  I’ve begun to track my dietary intake, writing down every bite I take in the back of this journal. If these new feelings and facts are the result of some change in my meals (as I suspect may be the case), then I intend to catch it. All I have to do is recognize the pattern, or the new introduction to my usual pattern. Then I’ll find it.

  Maybe I’ll add a second set of pages to the end of this volume, wherein I record the symptoms of resonance. Do they happen most often when I am indoors, or out? When I’m at the university, or at my home? Where do they come from, these flashes of . . . of overwhelming desire . . . of yearning, as if for someone or something who yearns for me in return?

  I’ll describe it yet.

  I suspect I’d better—my students are grumbling more than usual (and honestly, drat the ungrateful lot of them). They’ve been grousing to the dean that I’m becoming unresponsive, not making my office hours, and grading unfairly. Not a new complaint in the lot, but the volume has raised some interest. I don’t care for it, but there’s only so much I can do. I’ll carry on, teach my courses, and evaluate the brats as fairly as possible.