Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  • • •

  I invited the man inside, and he politely agreed—though only long enough for me to find my shoes, coat, and hat. I was missing all three, but I was within my own home, and I’d learned that some mundane procedures of civility must be allowed to simply fall by the wayside when larger projects presented themselves.

  He removed his hat and stood in the foyer, though of course he was welcome to enter the parlor, or anywhere else that suited his fancy, as far as I cared.

  He said to me, “I hope I haven’t come at an inconvenient time.”

  And I said, “No, of course not.” Then upon gazing at my surroundings—which I’d been neglecting, and having let the housekeeper go the week before . . . I hope he was not afraid that he’d interrupted some kind of personal tribulation.

  So I added, “I beg your pardon, with regard to all the clutter. I’m finally going through the particulars of my late wife’s estate, on behalf of her sister in Virginia. It’s been a difficult upheaval.” I was lying through my teeth, and surely he knew it. “But a necessary one, all the same. Given the intimate nature of this matter, I’ve relieved the housekeeper for a week or two, and I’m sorting through the archives of papers and property myself.”

  “My sympathies on your loss, Doctor.”

  “And I do appreciate them, but enough time has passed now . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to appear too cavalier. “It’s been two years. The time has come, that’s all, and there are some obligations we cannot foist off on other people. Now, tell me . . . ,” I said, changing the subject as I reached for my jacket and shuffled into it, “how can I be of service?”

  “Ah, yes. Perhaps I could treat you to coffee, or brunch? We can share a few words over something warm and filling.”

  Such a delicate suggestion, that we get the devil out of my filthy house—and it was presented with such aplomb! I accepted the offer immediately. We went to a dining room down by the pier, where over a light meal of coffee and egg sandwiches, the inspector unveiled the particulars that prompted this recent visit.

  “Since last we spoke, there have been a series of peculiar crimes throughout the state. For that matter, now that I say so out loud, it’s entirely possible that the incident with the Hamilton family was not the first representative of the . . . spree, if I dare call it such.”

  “A spree?” I asked, hoping my voice portrayed the strictest innocence.

  “I shouldn’t leap to such conclusions, Doctor—but for lack of a better term, I’m afraid it will have to do. Suffice it to say, people are dying in very strange ways. With little evidence to suggest a perpetrator, or indeed—in some cases—even so much as a crime.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “That’d make two of us.” He sounded weary. He removed his spectacles and wiped them clean on his napkin. “But there seems to be a certain . . . biological component to the mysteries. Something pertaining to the ocean, and what strange things might lurk in its unfathomed depths. A name has come up, and it’s possible that this person has some involvement in the matter. But personally,” he said with great emphasis, “I suspect it’s more a case of devoted envy. I think the biologist has a reader who’s enthralled with the man’s work, and might be using it as a guide, or inspiration, or . . . something,” he finished weakly.

  A warm, sick feeling in my stomach told me I knew the answer to my question before I even asked it, but I asked it anyway. “And this biologist’s name?”

  “The initials E.A., and surname Jackson. I put it to you that way, because there’s precious little information on the man. Anywhere. He professes a doctoral degree in the sciences from Princeton, but Princeton has never heard of him. Neither have the next tier of schools, and neither have any I searched upon casting a wider net. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t exist—outside a frankly outstanding set of publication credits, here in the States and abroad.”

  “You believe that E. A. Jackson is a pseudonym.”

  “It must be. Or else the man is a phantasm.”

  I tapped my coffee spoon against the saucer, and attempted to home in on his point. “But you said there’s some connection, between this mysterious Doctor Jackson and a series of strange crimes—maybe even the Hamiltons, or so you’d have me suspect. Since you’ve mentioned all these disparate elements in the same breath.”

  He looked at me strangely, and that was fair enough. A logical leap I’d made, but I’d made it too easily. I think we both knew it.

  “That is correct, Doctor.” He was weighing something. I could almost hear the gears grinding together in his brain. But he reached his decision, and he leaned forward, setting his napkin beside his plate. “And here is the nature of that connection, which I pray you will keep in the very strictest of confidence.”

  From his inside pocket, he removed an envelope; and from the envelope, he removed a sheet of paper. It was covered in handwriting, large and precise. “A copy,” he informed me, straightening it out, and likewise adjusting his glasses. “Of a letter left behind at one of the murder scenes.”

  He slipped it across the table.

  I removed my reading glasses from my vest pocket, applied them, and began to read, though there were places where I fumbled the words aloud, for they did not line up in my head . . . they did not make sense, they only made patterns and noise. But there was the name, right in the middle. Clear as day, and no mistaking it.

  My heart climbed into my throat, and stuck there.

  Physalia, Z. University I Was Not Now

  MISSIVE IMPERATIVE A DATE WOULD SAY NOTHING

  these are difficult times, exceptional times, changing times and I for one welcome them with open arms, but such is my way, such is the way of the ocean, the waters coming and going, moving with the moon, back and forth like the blood in our bodies and really I must thank you doctor. I must thank you and I must thank you in person, I will come to you and we will meet and you must explain to me as much as you can as much as anyone can what has become of the ocean not the ocean but that which lies in the ocean, from whence cometh the sample I have named Physalia zollicoffris I have named it after myself because it came before myself and now it is myself, we are the same now you see or you will see I will see to it I will see to you.

  • • •

  I would be together with you and we will talk together, doctor E A Jackson I recall thus your packages came signed that way and I always welcomed them I especially welcomed the last one and then I heard from you no more. it is possible I know it is possible that you have become like me like I have become, not one but many. not self but legion in accordance with the Bible which is not a good book not a very good book not a book at all just a stack of paper compared to the sample Doctor jackson I need to speak with you I will

  DEPART, ALL ANIMALS WITHOUT BONES

  Owen Seabury, M.D.

  APRIL 28, 1894

  I sat aghast, the note of a madman painstakingly scrawled before me. For what else could this fellow be, if not raving? If not utterly divorced from his senses? I stared at it in silence, the letters parading before my eyes . . . saying so much and so little all at once. Declaring and warning, threatening and announcing. But what? Beyond a general desire to meet E. A. Jackson? And furthermore, how had Inspector Wolf come to have it in his possession?

  Wolf prodded me. “Well?”

  “Well?” I replied helplessly. “It’s lunacy—that much is clear. Though the handwriting seems steady enough . . .”

  “A copy,” he reminded me.

  “Oh yes, that’s right. The words themselves, that’s the real kicker. Where did you find this, again?” It was worth asking, though I knew he’d be evasive.

  “At a scene . . . ,” he said vaguely, confirming my suspicion. He still wasn’t interested in telling me more about who he worked for, or what they wanted, or why. But the police accepted his authority, didn’t they? He obviously had some credentials, someplace, that proved his status.

  I lifted my eyebrow. “Wh
at kind of scene?”

  “A scene not entirely unlike that of the Hamiltons. The water damage, left over from some weird interior flood that damaged nothing else. The blood, the convoluted evidence and terrible smell. At first we even had a witness: a young woman who raved like Ebenezer, or maybe worse than that. I can’t say with certainty, having met the man after the fact.”

  “But you spoke to this woman?”

  “Only briefly. It’d be more accurate to say that she spoke to me. And I have to tell you”—he leaned forward, finger tapping on the paper that now lay between us—“she spoke like this. Her words, they flowed together this way, repeating, ebbing and surging.”

  “Do you think she wrote the note?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No. I’m quite confident she didn’t, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the handwriting on the original note . . . it’s definitely a man’s.”

  “And for another?”

  He took a swallow of coffee, and then told me flatly, “And for another, her right hand—her dominant hand—had been destroyed, its fingers chewed down to the first knuckles.”

  I shuddered, and he continued.

  “It’s possible she might’ve written it before . . . whatever occurred, but it seems unlikely. I hope you’ll pardon me, if I preserve some of the details, but even telling you this much is in breach of some very strict protocols. Suffice it to say, the woman didn’t compose this strange missive, but I believe she knew who did. I believe she saw him.”

  “Is that what she spoke to you about?”

  “Oh, no.” He shook his head again, more slowly this time. “She droned on about the water and the blood, and she cried and cried—mostly about her baby.”

  “There was . . . there was a baby?”

  “We found its remains scattered across several rooms. Listen, Doctor . . .” He shifted the conversation quickly, but the queasy feeling that arose in my stomach was not so swiftly appeased. “The moment she was left alone, she broke a window and used the glass to slice her wrists, and then her throat. She did such a thorough job that if a physician such as yourself had been on hand when she’d begun, you couldn’t have saved her. No, she was determined. And no, I don’t believe she wrote the missive. Whoever composed it . . . whoever he was . . .” He stared down at the sheet, as if his willpower could compel it to give him more information. “He wants to visit this E. A. Jackson. And I believe that the mysterious doctor is here, somewhere in Fall River.”

  Carefully, I said, “What leads you to that conclusion?”

  “Miskatonic University leads me to that conclusion.” He withdrew another set of papers from his internal pockets, and for one insane moment I fancied his vest to be a magician’s hat. “For it is upon that campus where yet another incident occurred, and unless I miss my guess, it was the very first.”

  He laid out a newspaper article in front of me. I skimmed it, reading with a dull sense of horror that a professor had lost his mind and murdered half a dozen of his peers before vanishing. I checked the date: December 7, the previous year.

  “Phillip Zollicoffer.” I read the name aloud. “Went mad and went on a . . . a spree, to use the word we nearly avoided earlier.”

  “A madman, to be sure. A brilliant one, with traceable degrees and a career of genius to recommend him. But something snapped, and now I suppose the university will need to hire a few more heads to round out its classrooms,” he said drolly. “And look, it’s the name, you see—here in the note. Zollicoffris. That’s what he calls his ‘sample,’ whatever on earth that might be. When I asked after him at the university, I received more details than I’d ever care to hear, to be frank, but it’s my duty to hear them, and I did. Indeed, he’d been corresponding with Doctor Jackson, who it would seem is quite an authority to be respected, in those circles.”

  He sighed.

  I said, “So this professor, Zollicoffer, he goes on a killing spree at his place of employment and disappears—only to continue the spree elsewhere?”

  “That is my theory,” he said, and now he produced a map pocked with red circles, connected by a line. The circles began at the far northwest corner of the state, and then trailed southward with minor deviations to the east and west. “These seven points, you see? Each one a crime so terrible that we’re keeping the journalists from as many details as we can. Beginning first up here, at the university.” He tapped the northernmost dot. “Then one after the other . . .”

  “Coming south. Coming toward Fall River.”

  “I believe so. This last set of killings—the woman and her family—it was only forty miles north of here, and a final destination of Fall River is no guess: for this is where Dr. Jackson’s packages have originated. Or so I learned when I received the remains of one, and checked the mark upon it—but even without the postal hints, you could simply follow the trajectory thus far and see that Fall River is in Zollicoffer’s way, if not in his plans. And his note, you see . . . it says, right here: ‘I know it is possible that you have become like me like I have become.’ What if the mad professor is right? What if Doctor Jackson is as mad as Doctor Zollicoffer—though his spree has run shorter, consisting only of the Hamilton family?”

  “It’s a clever hypothesis,” I granted.

  “Then you understand why I must find this fellow, and find him soon—before he selects another family to eradicate by whatever strange means his correspondent has discovered. If he’s mad like Zollicoffer, surely he will not stop.”

  I fell quiet, because I had no other course of action to save me.

  Inspector Wolf was silent, too, the pair of us looking over the sheets that sprawled across the table between us, occupying all the tablecloth between our plates and cups. Wolf was a brilliant man himself, and for all that he spoke of these two mysterious professors and their terrible brains, I had no doubt that one way or another, this inspector would find his way to Maplecroft eventually.

  I didn’t dare risk him snooping about, gathering information on the ladies therein, and possibly falling prey to some creature like the one I’d seen. No, all my good sense said it’d be wiser by far to escort him, quietly inform him, and allow him to ask his questions of the “doctor” herself—if she felt up to the task.

  I made up my mind to serve as a helpful go-between. He could either storm into Maplecroft on his own, like a very smart bull in a very prickly china shop; or I could gently guide him there, and thereby minimize any damage he might inadvertently inflict.

  “Inspector,” I said with great caution, “I believe I can help you, with regard to this Doctor Jackson. But it will require a measure of trust on your part, for the truth of the matter is peculiar beyond belief.”

  “Really? You know the man—or know where I might reach him? And please,” he said, his eyes eager behind the round spectacles, “don’t be so cruel as to direct me to the graveyard.”

  “Oh no, he’s not dead.” I glanced around, and seeing no one within earshot, I added quietly, “But the situation is not as you imagine. Doctor Jackson is a patient of mine—and is absolutely incapable of any violence at all.”

  “Is that so? Does he suffer some physical defect, or ailment?”

  I avoided my pronouns for the moment. “Largely bedridden,” I said simply. “With an advanced case of consumption, for the last several years. There’s more to it, I must tell you—but first, I must swear you to a very serious sort of secrecy.”

  “By all means, though I’d hope that my own divulgence of police procedure ought to earn me some measure of faith. But if Doctor Jackson is incapable of murder . . . then I suppose you must fear for your patient—now that you can reasonably expect that Zollicoffer is coming.”

  “I’m deeply frightened, yes. Jackson is scarcely capable of self-defense with a gun in hand, and in the event that you’re correct . . . Doctor Zollicoffer is in for a rude surprise. One that will certainly drive him to violence, or greater violence, since he is already so inclined.”

  “Doctor Seabu
ry, I truly believe that discretion is the better part of valor, but I wish you’d speak plainly.”

  “You know, I think it might be easier to show you plainly. Come with me, if you would. I’ll take you to Doctor Jackson, and you can see for yourself.”

  Emma L. Borden

  APRIL 29, 1894

  Every time I think we’ve found the worst of it, I’m mistaken. You’d think I’d quit making such assumptions—that surely, by now, nothing could surprise or appall me, at least nothing new. But here it comes. And here we go. And if I was at a loss before, I’m utterly drowning in confusion now.

  Doctor Seabury came around again today, and he was not alone.

  He was joined by a man called Inspector Wolf, a name both ludicrous and accurate. Ludicrous, because you never saw a man who looked less like a wolf: he’s a short, fat thing with a squint, watching the world from behind a pair of spectacles that might not be strong enough for him. I’ll grant you, he’s a sharp dresser. Maybe that’s true of all gentlemen from Boston. I don’t know; I haven’t seen a large enough sampling. But he wears black and white, and everything is pressed and shined to its appropriate degree. Cleanliness and godliness, and all that rot.

  I would’ve preferred some warning, prior to meeting him. Then again, I would have preferred a great many things which are well outside my grasp, so there’s no sense in sulking. The good doctor has done well by us—as best as he could, given the circumstances. I know he meant no harm, and likely meant only to protect us from further inquiry, but still. I found the whole thing stressful beyond belief.

  (As if Nance weren’t already problem enough. She’s presently secured to a sturdy set of mahogany bedposts in the second guest room. Lizzie lingers by her at every spare opportunity, but I can’t say there’s been any real change since the other night. She moans and fusses. She struggles and whines. She chants, or asks, or whatever she’s doing, to be let out . . . out . . . out . . . until I’m so sick of the word that I wish to stitch her lips shut and throw her into the ocean. Would that be far enough out for her?