Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  As for the live bacteria, I’m busy culturing it, trying to bolster the supply. I think we might need more—if my theory holds up, that is. If it doesn’t, we’re all damned regardless.

  But if it does, we might stand a chance against the darkness.

  • • •

  Next, I will try the toxoid on Nance.

  I have a feeling that if anything is likely to produce a strong response, the dead and treated bacteria will be more likely to prompt it than the serum, which has previously developed antibodies that have reacted to the bacteria. The toxoid should force her to create her own antibodies, or that’s what I’d like to see.

  If that makes any sense.

  I am throwing darts at a wall, and I’m running out of darts.

  • • •

  I told Lizzie about my plan to give Nance the toxoid, and she balked at the prospect. I’m not sure why; at this point the girl will either live or die, and if we do nothing, the outcome is guaranteed so far as I’m concerned. Why not apply the potential remedies at our disposal, in case we might get lucky?

  “But you’ve given her the other doses already, and she hasn’t responded.”

  “She’s not responded much,” I admitted. “But some, I think. Her fever is down from yesterday, and her breathing appears more normal to me.”

  “Do you think?”

  “I do,” I assured her.

  “Please, don’t lie to me, Doctor. I don’t want to play games with myself, or fool myself into thinking there’s some improvement if there’s none to observe—and I watch her so closely, I know her body more thoroughly than my own. I’m not arguing with you; it’s just that I prefer no hope at all, if the only other option is false hope.”

  “That’s brave of you, and reasonable, too.” I then explained why the toxoid might provoke a more vigorous reaction, and did my best to reassure her without being cruel. “It may help her, or at the very worst, it will have no effect.”

  “It won’t infect her with tetanus? I’ve heard infection is a concern with some inoculations, but I know almost nothing about this one.”

  “It will not,” I promised, uncertain of whether or not I was lying. But it’s as I said: the girl is dying anyway. Our best hope is to see her improved, or passed away before she can harm anyone else.

  Lizzie accepted my promises, and I felt a twinge of guilt—but nothing I couldn’t ignore. This was for the best. And for all I knew, I was telling the truth.

  It’s a hard line to take, but I’ve taken it before.

  During the war, every day was a hundred such choices, a hundred opportunities to kill or save, and a hundred spins of the roulette wheel—tempted and tilted with nothing but our prayers.

  And here I am again. Throwing prayers at pathogens, invocations against monsters.

  No. I have more than that, this time. Or I will, given time.

  Dear God, give us time.

  Emma L. Borden

  MAY 5, 1894

  Soon.

  Very soon. It’s not that I can “feel” him, as the doctor keeps asking me; it’s not that I can sense the tug of him, like Lizzie senses the green stones. (And as I have sensed them before, to a lesser degree.) It’s simple math that leads me to my conclusion. He’s been approaching long enough, and this is no Greek paradox. Eventually, the monster must arrive.

  Lizzie asked if I was afraid. I told her no.

  Seabury asked if I was feeling well. I told him yes.

  Some days I am afraid. Some days I feel weak. Nothing is really untrue anymore, much as nothing really makes sense. Seabury can go on and on about his patterns, and I don’t think he’s strictly mistaken; but likewise, he surely is not strictly correct. He tries to engage me with his theories, and I try to listen. It’s not that I don’t understand them; it’s that I find his efforts toward companionship difficult to reconcile, given his betrayal, and now his trust—as if I’m some partner. Or no, that’s not it. Not exactly. He does not view me as a peer. He treats me like a student, and I have little patience for it.

  He would not have shown such casual, well-meaning disrespect to E. A. Jackson. No, of course not. That’s why I guarded my other name, my other self so closely. And there you see the fissure between us now.

  He thinks he’s mending a fence, but he’s digging a trench.

  • • •

  I let him inoculate me against tetanus, because it seemed to make him happy. He wants so badly to help, and we all so badly need the help, that it would’ve been silly to refuse. Just like it was silly for Lizzie to initially fight about dosing Nance with the tetani samples. It was ridiculous of her, given how long and loudly she’s complained about having no action to take, no hopeful means of bringing her lover back around.

  But eventually Lizzie acquiesced, and from the sounds of things, there’s been some slight, barely perceptible change in the right direction for our bed-bound guest. An improvement in her respiration, a decline in the fever that has left her sweating through the sheets, soaking great yellow stains down to the mattress.

  But for all we know, these are only the signs of an imminent end.

  We can’t really control her—that much has been established. We tie her to the bed, but at night, when no one watches, she frees herself and wanders down to the cellar, or throws herself into the tub, or whatever else her somnambulistic brain finds appropriate. Now, I suppose, we insist upon the ties for the insurance of having done so, should anyone learn of our plight and ask us why we didn’t do anything.

  Well, we did. That’s what we’ll tell them. We tried everything. And we stuck to it, even when it didn’t really work. The times, they were desperate indeed.

  But I doubt anyone will ever inquire.

  • • •

  We’ve proceeded this far into darkness largely because no one wants to be seen talking to us, or visiting us, or otherwise providing any ordinary human interaction. We’re starved for it, prevented from it except for our new old friend the doctor—whose presence no longer gives me any joy at all—and we’ve been starved for years.

  That’s our punishment, I guess. Since they couldn’t convict my sister, and they couldn’t banish us to memory. Since she went free, and we stayed here. They will ignore us . . . and in that way, they get what they want. They get to behave as if nothing ever happened.

  To hell with Fall River.

  Things happened.

  And things are happening still, so many things that even the blind, bored, petty, avoidant people of this godforsaken little burg are being forced to sit up and notice. This time they cannot blame any strangeness on my sister.

  They might blame it on me, if they knew how—but they’d be wrong.

  In part. I summoned Zollicoffer with the sample; that’s my cross to bear, and I’ll carry it with these withered shoulders because apparently I have no choice. It was an accident, a simple act of friendliness that somehow warped into one of evil summoning, and I do not understand how. But I understand and accept my place in this otherworldly passion play.

  Likewise, I do not understand what happened to Abigail and our father. They changed before the sample was sent, and before anyone else began to show signs of the creeping madness and violence. They were the first to go insane, and the first to become deadly and turn on their loved ones.

  Father was, anyway. Abigail didn’t care about us one way or another, so it could scarcely be argued that she “turned” on us. But the sentiment stands.

  Lizzie believes it has to do with that pendant Father gave her for their anniversary that year, a few months before their deaths. The pendant is under our floorboards now, under our house; I think it first came from a pretty bit of sea glass Abigail found while down at the shore one day.

  Or maybe I’m only filling in that part. Maybe I never knew, and I only want to apply some symmetry to the horror. Let us say that it all came from the sea: the glass pendant, the sample, the creatures with the needle-glass teeth that hound Maplecroft when the air is right and th
e call goes out. My sister holds to her speculations, that the monsters are transformed people, or they rise from the earth. She hasn’t gone so far as to suggest that they fall from the sky, but she’s curiously averse to admitting the obvious: They come from the ocean, too.

  The webbed fingers, translucent eyes and skin. The teeth that remind me not of sharks or piranhas, but those you’ll find in the mouths of Lophiiformes. Yes, it’s very much like the anglerfishes and their kind—a jumble of pins and needles, protruding more than they’re concealed.

  All of it comes from the water. Everything, at the start. Didn’t Darwin suggest as much? That life itself came from the ocean, in some roundabout way? Well, if not him, then his followers and subsequent researchers have certainly posited it, and with great vigor.

  Life and death.

  Our mother and grave, and the only thing between us is the shore.

  FAMILY SLAIN IN MAYFIELD

  Parkridge Gazette, May 7, 1894

  Reporting by Alfred Hanson

  In the wee hours of Tuesday, May 2, four family members were gruesomely slain as they slept in their beds, on a farm three miles outside Mayfield. Authorities are withholding details in advance of a formal investigation, and pending the visit of an inspector from Boston, arriving to help manage the difficult case.

  At this time, very little is known for certain, and that which is certainly known does not make the very best of sense. The victims are a husband and wife, Bradford and Margaret Moore, and two of their three children, four year old Christian, and two year old Beverly. One child survived the attack, and miraculously uninjured—according to the woman who discovered the scene, Daisy Rogers, a young widow who had joined the family recently in order to help with spring demands.

  Miss Rogers was instructed to avoid speaking with the press, but so terribly has she been rattled by the incident that bits and pieces have found their way to our type-writers nonetheless.

  According to her report, there were pools of bloody water all across the floors, soaking the furniture, and splattered across the windows—and the bodies were gruesomely mutilated, as if they’d been struck repeatedly by a hatchet or some other heavy blade. Furthermore, they had been propped up around the dinner table, in some weird tableau of horror.

  Perhaps worst of all comes from the lone survivor, eight year old Constance. Constance was found lying in a dry bathtub, crying because she could not work the pump or carry the water to fill it. Despite her distress, she was not injured in any way, and in fact spoke wistfully of the handsome man of the sea. This detail is chilling, for the child has been blind since birth—and has no way of knowing whether or not the killer was handsome or horrible. Yet she insists that she saw him, and that he smiled at her, and told her to wait.

  At present, the child is in the care of her aunt and uncle, who watch her carefully for clues beyond what she’s stated about the event. If she’s upset by the loss of her family, she does not show it. But then, according to her new guardians, she’s always been peculiar. It has been suggested that she’s an imbecile, or something close to it.

  At this time, there is no further, formal word on her condition, or the state of the investigation; but officials are recommending that all citizens in the region should keep watch for strangers, and take reasonable precautions to guard themselves during this unusual time of creative violence, perpetrated against innocents.

  Owen Seabury, M.D.

  MAY 7, 1894

  Nance is gone, but I’ll explain this part first: I found the newspaper article in an envelope, stuck inside my door with a brief telegram—explaining that it’d been sent via express, courtesy of Inspector Wolf. I don’t know how he knew about it so soon, much less how he got it to me with such alacrity (all the way from Boston), but here it is, and here the monster comes. Ready or not, as the children say.

  Mayfield. That’s not five miles out. He’s drawn this near, and he’ll draw nearer still. He could walk the distance in a short afternoon. One must assume that he will do so.

  Assuming it, and being able to plan against it . . . those are different things.

  I’ve been terribly busy as it is, for let’s take off the rosy glasses—Fall River is going to hell, one man at a time. One woman. One child. Mad and sick and dead, with anyone caught in the middle babbling to the authorities and being sent away. People are finally beginning to talk in earnest, sensing a pattern beyond the sensational Hamilton deaths—the most sensational in town since Lizzie Borden took her axe and inspired schoolyard rope-skipping—but there’s too little and too late, and this is a fine show of both.

  I’ve heard talk of calling in the government for assistance, but what help could soldiers be? Then we’d have armed murderous madmen in our streets, as opposed to the armed murderous madmen who stay in their homes or fling themselves into the ocean.

  Chatter goes around regarding some plague, unidentified and untreatable; and there are worries that specialists from the city will be called for, and we shall all be trapped in our homes, as in older times, when people knew nothing of cholera or anything bubonic. There are whispers that men in masks and official jackets will patrol the streets, and the calls of yesteryear, “Bring out your dead!” will ring through the town. We shall all be cut off, from our loved ones and the rest of the world alike. We shall die alone and in infamy, victims of things we do not understand and cannot fight. Fall River will go down in history as a place where people die in awful, unexplained ways. It’ll be a ghost town in a year. The government will burn it to the ground as a public health hazard.

  Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

  • • •

  So anyway, there’s talk.

  And there’s plenty of fear to go around, even though the denizens of Fall River know nothing about what’s coming, or who’s coming. They have no idea what they’re up against. Neither do I, but knowing what little I do . . . somehow that’s worse. It’d be better, easier, I think, if I only worried about what germ or contagion we fought. It’d be simpler if I did not know that it had a name, and that it wore a man’s face, and it killed more viciously (if more swiftly) than any microbe.

  Whatever it is, it comes from the water. I’m confident of that now—as confident as I am that the tetanus pattern is a pattern in fact, and not in theory. Not a perfect one, but a recognizable one. I will cling to that which I recognize. But regardless of what Emma thinks, I do not cling to it without reason or clarity, without evidence. It is there. I know it’s there. I can see it.

  That’s why I cling. It gives me a direction, and reinforces my sense of purpose.

  Especially now that Nance is gone. Especially now that this Zollicoffer comes closer.

  • • •

  Nance is gone, but that wasn’t the first thing I knew this morning.

  The first thing was the express package from Wolf, and the second was that Mrs. Easley down at the dry goods store has taken a pair of scissors and shut herself in the storeroom, and no one has been able to speak with her or open the door—but there was water pouring from underneath it. No pipes had burst, for there were no pipes to fail; no pump was within the store, and no one could explain the flood that poured out from under the doors, and the mist that steamed the windows from within.

  I learned this when a neighborhood boy came charging up the steps, right as I was finished reading the news clipping, standing there on my own stoop in a dressing robe and bare feet, stunned and full of questions.

  The boy’s name is Arnold, or Arthur, or Allan, or something along those lines. He gasped out that I had to come to Granston’s quick, because Mrs. Easley was infected and she had holed up in the store with a set of shears.

  Infected. They now speak of it in terms of illness. As they damned well ought to.

  I thanked the boy for the information, told him I’d be on my way as soon as I could find some shoes, and shut the door in his face. Too abruptly, I’m confident. He must’ve thought he’d angered me, or that I was a jackass; I don’
t know. But I spent a moment leaning my back against the closed door, wondering if I should bother to go address the situation. I was thinking of Ebenezer Hamilton, and that terrible scene, and knowing that whatever awaited at Granston’s Dry Goods would surely be no better.

  Then I wondered if she was alone. I hadn’t given the boy time to say one way or another. There might be other victims within. There might still be someone to save. Not too little, not too late, for one person or more.

  It was a stupid hope, but I held it aloft regardless as I found proper clothes and dressed myself; it took longer than it should have—yes, I know. My house is filling with detritus, with nonsense. I’m entombing myself and even I can see it, plain as day.

  I have stopped seeing patients in my home, and will only make house calls—and every day, more do clamor for my attention. I’ve canceled what appointments I can, and spent those hours in Lizbeth’s laboratory.

  It’s a good laboratory she’s built. She’s done a fine job. I’ve lost what feels like days there; down in that space, the time doesn’t pass the same way, I don’t think. Something about the stones she keeps in the box beneath the floor. I know where they are, under what floorboards the cabinet lies, but I do not even stand atop it. I walk around that place on the floor, lest the temptation to open it become too great.

  It will not become too great.

  I know too well what became of Nance before we lost her. It cannot happen to me, too. If it happens to the rest of the Maplecroft crew, then truly the world is done for.