Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  If she stays here much longer, she’ll find her way downstairs, and what will become of us then? What if she sees the whole lot of equipment, never mind what we added from the upstairs—the most incriminating books, charms, devices, and whatnot that we wished to remove from her view?

  From a certain slant, it would appear that my sister and I are the witches we’re accused of being.

  Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps the whispers have merit. What else would you call it but witchcraft—these experiments my sister undertakes in the basement laboratory, and around the walls and windows of this home? She’s turning it into a fortress of superstition, but if you ask her, she’ll argue that it’s all science . . . of a kind.

  I understand her sentiments, but it’s hard to agree wholeheartedly when she starts wondering aloud which herbs and prayers might protect us.

  The distance between an honest Christian mystic and a fortune-teller is sometimes less than half a whisper. Less than a pot of tea or the space between two book covers.

  Unless I’m the silly one now—and that’s entirely possible.

  • • •

  It’s very quiet upstairs. I’m almost surprised they wore themselves out so quickly, though given the noisy vigor of the whole affair, it might not be such a mystery. Lizzie often has trouble sleeping, but if rumor among married ladies can be believed, there’s nothing quite like a good frolic to send one off to slumberland with haste.

  And yet.

  Lizzie’s trouble sleeping has extended into Nance’s visits, in the past. But tonight, she doesn’t even snore. It’s only Nance who’s restless, wandering up and down the stairs, standing in the kitchen like a ghost, like she’s forgotten something, like she’s waiting for something. Like she’s listening.

  This is the second instance tonight that the girl’s appeared, and this time she either didn’t notice that I was still awake and writing, or didn’t care. She stood before the cellar door again; I could just barely see her shadow, stretching out into the corridor between us. It was long, for she is tall; and it was half-gauzy with the moonlight and gas lamp glow through the windows, shining through the fabric of her nightdress.

  I reached for the bell beside my makeshift bed, but before I could ring it and, it is to be fervently hoped, summon my sister . . . Nance changed her mind and returned to the upstairs.

  Maybe she was warned away by my candle after all.

  Well, these words—combined with the last of the article revisions—have eaten up an hour and a half. No, closer to two, I should think. And I’m still wide-awake.

  Perhaps I’ll begin that letter to Doctor Zollicoffer.

  I would dearly love to hear from him again.

  Owen Seabury, M.D.

  APRIL 24, 1894

  I’ve avoided the Borden sisters these recent days—not by choice, but by forced circumstance. The mysterious Inspector Wolf has occupied much of my time, and most of that has been too tedious to record in this informal, private journal. Regardless, I am sickened at heart to know what I now know, or believe what I now believe; and the scientific facts under consideration do little to soothe me. Whatever they are, they don’t add up. Whatever they say, it answers no questions that a reasonable man might ask.

  When did I stop being a reasonable man?

  It must have happened slowly at first, with Abigail Borden. And then with great finality, across that cold wood table from Ebenezer Hamilton. And now . . . now I am either much closer to the truth, or much further from my sanity.

  I honestly could not say which.

  • • •

  Ebenezer remains in Boston, and I haven’t spoken to him since that awful night in the courthouse. I offered my continuing services as confidant, witness, and even friend, should he require one; but either the message was not passed along or the ensuing silence was his response.

  Were we friends, really?

  No. But he needs one, and I’m too close to . . . to whatever this is . . . to walk away now. If he were to summon me, I would respond.

  Inspector Wolf finally returned to that city as well, with all his notes and flash-fired photographs of the corpses, the scene of the crime (Was it a crime? No one seems certain), and whatever else he deemed significant. We shook hands and I told him to call upon me anytime, if he required a partner with a steady hand and a cast-iron stomach. He agreed with a smile, but I’d be surprised to see him again.

  He suspects something strange is afoot. But suspecting it and doing something about it are two different things, and my suspicions tell me this: If I tried to bring him in, to confide in him the things I have learned, and the theories I’m inexorably forming . . . his training and allegiance to law and order would prevent him from being any real aid. Besides, he wouldn’t even offer any badge, or the title of any official organization as employer. Heaven only knew who he was really working for. At worst, he might have me carted off to join Ebenezer, that we may rot together, two madmen in our soft-walled cells.

  It is best that I leave him out of this, despite my inclination to do otherwise.

  Upon reflection, it’s apparent that I wish for someone to help me bear the weight of it, though. Lizzie must feel the same way. For that matter, she must’ve felt the same way for years now.

  I wonder how long she’s known?

  Before her parents’ deaths, that is. I wonder how long she’d been aware that something was amiss, and how long she’d told herself that no, it couldn’t possibly be anything so absurd as . . . as whatever this has turned out to be. I wonder how long she lied to herself, and maybe to her sister, before the situation forced itself to a climax, and there were no options left except to murder or be murdered.

  • • •

  I have a few patients this afternoon, but tomorrow morning I’ll pay the ladies a visit. I don’t know whether that friend of theirs will be present, and I don’t know whether she’s aware of the murders—the new murders, or new deaths, or . . . I don’t know. Even when I compose my confessions to no one but myself, I can’t seem to get my head straight.

  Every minute, my thoughts are occupied by fear.

  At first I thought it was merely the flush of chemicals that flood the human body at the prospect of danger, excitement, or imminent threat. At first I thought it was only some leftover shaking, unresolved from that night with Ebenezer and that first day with Wolf, when we saw the corpses.

  But that was only at first.

  And now . . . now that’s not what I think. Too much other strangeness abounds, and not all of it is contained within my head. I haven’t the mental scope or imagination to produce it, only to recognize it, when it presents itself in patterns.

  I walk down the street and I peel my eyes for signs of the dangerous taint—the sickness, if I must call it something mundane.

  I watch for signals and symptoms; I gaze from beneath the brim of my hat, observing those who pass me by. I watch the men and women in the cafes and restaurants, and I watch them on the pier. I watch them about their business, running their daily errands, lifting their babies from basinets and riding their bicycles, buying their groceries, greeting the milkman, ordering seeds for their gardens. I stare at them while they’re measured by tailors, searching their bags for coins to hand to the paperboy, collecting their mail, hanging their laundry pin by pin upon the lines—that it might dry in the sun, when the sun peeks through this oddly weathered spring. I scan their faces and their gestures, their postures, the gait of their walks, the flush of their cheeks, the way they count on their fingers or use their toes to nudge the neighbor’s cat off the stairs and out of their paths.

  I count how many times they blink.

  If I’m not careful, I’ll go mad. If I’m not careful, worse things yet may occur. So I remain careful, and I take my notes when I take my tea, and I brew coffee strong enough to keep my eyes wide-open as I make my rounds.

  And I will record the things that I’ve seen, even if they seem trivial and unrelated. I do not know what relates to what,
so everything must be mentioned and cataloged. Everything must be seen and remembered.

  It’s all written down. Not here, but in the patient folders.

  Mr. Wells has developed a strange pattern of moles on his back, veritably overnight. Not shingles, not pustules, but moles with a spreading pattern, not unlike a swirl, a whirlpool, a twist of water. At first he swore that it itched and ached, but his wife confided that he’s getting worse, and he’s begun talking to the pattern and listening for a response. At night she hears something, it sounds warm and wet, and it smells like brine and seaweed in the sun.

  Miss Fox’s parents insist she’s been feverish for two days, but when I visited she was clammy and cold, and her eyes would scarcely focus. She insisted she’s fine, and wants to go back to school. I suggested another two days of bed rest. Something is amiss. Her mother says she won’t stay in bed, but wanders the house at night, tapping her hands against the windows as if blindly feeling her way around the rooms, and when she walks in her sleep she whispers, “Out, out, out . . .” until they force her back to bed.

  They’ve forced her back to bed, and lashed her foot to the post like a hobbled horse. (Like Matthew, before he went mad and murderous.)

  Mrs. Williams lives around the corner from the Hamiltons’ store and she’s called for the police twice in the last week, confident that there’s someone moving around inside the shop, someone trying to break down the walls and come through the building itself, trying to get out, out, out. Last night she was found on her front lawn, beneath the big oak in the yard, covered in blood. She stood in her nightdress, muttering about how she’d opened everything, she’d broken the windows and it could get out now, couldn’t it? It would quit asking her now, wouldn’t it?

  I treated her cuts, and when I cleaned them I saw they were sliced in patterns, not the ordinary patterns of a window’s shattered shards, but in horizontal lines, back and forth, very deep. It didn’t match her story, but what could I say? Still she spouted nonsense, unless it wasn’t nonsense. I gave her an opiate and sent her to sleep at her sister’s house, at the other side of town.

  There’s more.

  Several more I ought to mention here, and they all feel like a pattern, or part of one. But someone is knocking at the door, and it’s the kind of knock that says to come now.

  Lizzie Andrew Borden

  APRIL 25, 1894

  I should’ve known something untoward was going on when I started sleeping better. Suspiciously better. Ordinarily I snap awake in the morning, shortly after dawn, no matter how late the previous evening has kept me working; but these last few nights, I’d drop to sleep and stay that way until seven or eight, and most recently, all the way to nine o’clock.

  It was foolish to pretend that nothing was afoot or amiss, and it was more foolish still of me to pretend that Nance had nothing to do with it. She’s the only new variable in the household.

  No, that’s not quite true.

  There’s Doctor Seabury. His knowledge of what we do here—even if it was, at first, a rudimentary understanding of what we’re up against—that’s new, and it counts for something. But up until this evening, I could not have asked him to drop everything and come sit beside me, and listen to my tales of woe as if he had nothing better to do.

  Now I know.

  I’ve been looking at this all wrong.

  This is the highest priority, for me, for Emma, and for him—for anyone who has any inkling of what’s going on. I know it is. It must be. But progress on the matter has been so slow, and escalation had appeared to plateau until recently. My God, I’d become almost complacent about it.

  About them. The creatures with the shark-white skin and glass-needle teeth.

  But there have only been a few, and no new visitations since that one I killed in the middle of March. No new visitations of any kind except . . . well, Nance, and that’s not the same.

  Yet it’s not unrelated, either. She came, and she caused this new escalation, but that’s my fault. Mine entirely. I should’ve sent her right back home on the same train she arrived in. I should’ve thrown her luggage out on the lawn and told her to make her way back to the city. I should’ve pushed her away, chased her away, thrown her away if it came to that.

  I didn’t. And look what it’s gotten me.

  Look where it’s gotten us.

  • • •

  I awoke to Emma’s bell, but I awoke slowly and unhappily. I wasn’t ready. I was dreaming of Nance, and there was silk. Silk dresses? Sheets? Something soft and luxurious, something that flowed and billowed. Something dry and smooth, but soft as mist. I can’t recall, but wherever it was, whatever the dream was about . . . I didn’t want to leave it.

  But the bell rang and rang and rang, with all of Emma’s strength, and I was compelled to answer it.

  I tried to rise out of the covers, and I stumbled, falling to all fours. My head was swimming. I was swimming, my arms and legs made of some slippery, uncertain substance. Still stuck in the dream, they were. That’s where I was swimming, I guess, wherever the world was made of silk sheets and quiet.

  I forced myself to climb up, using the bed itself for support. And I realized then what I should’ve noticed immediately: Nance wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was empty, and when I placed a hand on the indentation her body had made in the comforter, I found no warmth to suggest she’d only just left me.

  And then it all fell into place.

  My wobbly brain, my sleep growing longer by the night. Her fixation with the cellar door, all talk of lovers’ bargains aside. Lies, and treachery. She’s been drugging me, testing the dose to see what would send me deepest to sleep, and keep me there longest. She’s been waiting for us to move Emma back upstairs, so that Emma wouldn’t catch her by accident, or see her as she slipped downstairs to the door.

  Perhaps oddly, I understood all of these things even before I noticed that the key was gone.

  Sometimes it’s funny, the way the mind works. How it assembles the minor pieces before the major ones arrive, solving the mystery in reverse, before all the clues are provided. It could’ve been the drugs—whatever she’d used against me. Some syrup or serum. Something that hid the big things but let me see the little ones.

  I slapped my hand against my chest, where the cellar key usually hung on its chain. No, it wouldn’t be there. It’d be on the dresser. I stumbled to the dresser, my feet still refusing to cooperate with me, not fully. I felt a moment’s jolt of relief, even as Emma’s bell still rang, because there it was—the chain with the attendant key I always wore against my breasts.

  Then I picked it up.

  I examined it, squeezing it to reassure myself that all was well. But all was not well. Emma was still ringing. Her wrists must’ve been about to fall off. It must’ve been exhausting, the ringing all this time. But still I ignored it, not quite alert enough to attend to more than one thing at a time. The key in my fist. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.

  It wasn’t the cellar key, but some clever replacement, originally fitting the lock to God knew what. God knew where she’d found it.

  God knew what she’d done.

  I went for my wardrobe—almost fell into it, if the truth be known. I bruised myself against it as I wrestled the door open and pulled out my axe, which I did not leave out in the open when Nance was around, not anymore. I’d started hiding it, like it was some secret. Like she hadn’t seen it already. She liked it a little too much, that was all. It made me feel strange.

  “Emma!” I shouted, having heard all I could stand of the bell. “Emma, I’m up! I’m coming!”

  I ran down the hall, my knees still feeling like they weren’t quite mine, and weren’t quite connected to my body. It was a jerky stumble at best, but I stayed upright and dashed to Emma’s room, where I looked in and saw at a glance that she was alive, and unharmed, and that Nance wasn’t with her.

  “Nance . . . ,” she gasped.

  “I’ll get her,” I swore, half out o
f breath already.

  I didn’t stay to hear her reply. I made for the stairs, where I tripped over my own toes and went face-first into the banister—and I caught myself, dragged myself to a stop before I’d gone down too terribly far, and shook the ringing out of my ears. It wasn’t Emma’s bell anymore. It was just the incessant hum of my head trying to force the rest of me more fully awake, because this was bad. Worse than bad. Worse than terrible, and worse than whatever is worse than that. I felt it in my bones, and my bones were still shaking—not yet ready to hold me up. My legs ached, and I wondered quite seriously if I hadn’t fractured something.

  (I turned out to be right, but it wasn’t my leg after all; it was my nose when it slammed against the edge of a step, or one of the banister rods. I have no idea which. I didn’t see the blood until later.)

  I didn’t know what Nance would do if she found the cellar. Would she see the equipment and investigate it? Destroy it? Demolish my research at the behest of whatever drew her down there? What if she found the cupboard in the floor?

  What would that mean? What would it do?

  I made it to the bottom of the stairs by the skin of my teeth, collected myself, and retrieved the axe. (It had fallen out of my grasp and toppled the rest of the way down without me.) I scrambled into the kitchen, and there, yes—the cellar door. Flung open. Swinging slowly on its hinge, and a soft rushing noise like wind in a cave escaping past it, up into the house.

  Hoarsely I screamed Nance’s name, and took a better grip on the axe, praying that I wouldn’t need it. I didn’t know if I could kill her, if it came to that. I didn’t know what I’d do when I found her, or what she would’ve done to herself.

  What was calling her?

  It must’ve been the stones, yes. Sealed in their box, and sometimes that wasn’t enough to keep even me from hearing them, and becoming enraptured. I’d learned the price of listening to them, and I knew how much I had to lose. Nance didn’t. Nance didn’t deserve to be in the middle of this.