Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  • • •

  As I said, or as I tried to say and lost track of myself . . . we lost Nance.

  I mean to write about that, and I will. It happened the day after I gave her the heavy dose of the toxoid, so I suppose we know that, at least. Or do we? Correlation and causation . . . post hoc, ergo proper hoc. It’s bad science, but it’s all we have time for.

  So I’ll say it then: The toxoid brought about a change in her.

  • • •

  But first I went to the dry goods store, and I was too late, thank God.

  (If He exists to receive any appreciation. I remain ever the filthy atheist, but He’s crept into my language, and it’s just as well. It keeps people fooled. So thank God, I say.)

  By that, I mean that I did not have to intervene in anything. No one else was involved, and the woman was dead before I arrived, the scissors opened just enough to stab through both her eyes. Self-inflicted. I saw it in a moment.

  I saw it in the gory fingerprints, and the bloody messages she’d scrawled across the floor, the walls, the windows. Using her blood for ink.

  They were hardest to read on the windows, for they were runny and almost washed clean with water. Like everywhere else I’d seen the phenomenon so far, the water came from nowhere and smelled terrible. It drained out through the store, and seeped through the floorboards to soak the foundations. It was gone by the time I got there, just like the life of the woman whose troubles had summoned me.

  (As for the message—mostly it was one word, written again and again: out. And perhaps even more oddly, the handwriting did not appear to belong to one person alone. It came in script, in print, and in combinations of the two. It was smeared in angular lines, and smoothly composed with a flowing hand. I do not know what this means, but I’m writing it down as I write everything down, and for the same reason. It might be useful. To someone. Eventually.)

  I told the officer on the scene that I’d send for Inspector Wolf, and whoever the young man was, he looked relieved—for this was out of his hands at last. Thank heaven there was someone more qualified to manage these unmanageable acts.

  It isn’t true, really. To the best of my immediate knowledge, Wolf is no more qualified than anyone else. Certainly no more qualified than Lizzie or myself, and if we are the best informed of mankind, then there are dire times ahead indeed.

  Or . . . no. I might be wrong.

  It could be, Wolf is looking at patterns just like we are—but he’s seeing different ones, that’s all. He’s seen the crimes as they connect, even if he cannot draw the lines precisely between them. And I call him “inspector”—everyone refers to him thusly—but now that I pause to consider it, I have no idea what force or office employs him. Is he a policeman? A federal agent? Some kind of marshal?

  I wonder whether I ought to call him and tell him to join us at the spinsters’ house, that he may wait with us. He did offer to deploy security men, didn’t he? I’d prefer if he came himself, alone. He might be able to help.

  Or he might be one more body when the smoke clears.

  I don’t know what to do. Well, he’s the one who sent me the article, so he knows already how near at hand is our peril. The decision is his. He can come if he wants, or leave us if he doesn’t.

  • • •

  I walked around the scene of the crime, if suicide by gruesome means can be considered a crime. Is it? Surely not. If suicide is illegal, then nothing in the world makes sense.

  At any rate, Mrs. Easley harmed no one but herself, however violently she might have done so. I did not want to investigate it. There was nothing I could tell the earnest, frightened policemen. Nothing to ease their worry or reassure them that this was an isolated incident. They already knew it wasn’t. They already knew about the Hamiltons; and they knew about the Davids, the Jessups. They knew about Mr. Winters and Miss Angeline Frye. They were aware of the situation with Harlan Sykes.

  They know they might be next. Oh, those poor boys. They are so afraid.

  I am jealous of them, because they do not know how afraid they ought to be.

  • • •

  I left the scene without taking notes. I did not mention the waterlogged floor, the damp-damaged walls, or the scissor handles protruding from the woman’s face, like a demented pair of spectacles. I made no commentary on the blood—they thought it must be too much for one corpse to hold, but they were mistaken. The water made it look worse, having diluted and spread the gore around; if you don’t know the viscosity of blood, you wouldn’t know the difference. Besides, those boys had no idea how much fluid a body can hold. They’d never seen one drained before. I have. In the war, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. Those were bodies broken apart, smashed and incomplete, oozing rather than gushing or spilling. So little left inside them that nothing pumped, ticked, or flowed.

  I didn’t tell them any of that. I only told them that they knew where to find me, and I said I would send Inspector Wolf a wire.

  I couldn’t if I wanted to. He’s never given me any contact information, or any office where a telegram might be received. I still have no idea who he works for, or why.

  • • •

  All day, the knowledge that the monster was so close, and coming closer, weighed on me. All through those hours, I carried the weight of Zollicoffer’s impending arrival.

  I shouldn’t have bothered to visit the late, lamented Mrs. Easley. I’d known already what I would find, and I contributed nothing to the conversation as to her demise. It would’ve served no purpose to tell the young officers that she’d been driven mad and committed suicide because there was a monster who had been transformed by something pulled from the ocean last year. It would’ve done nothing to help, if I’d added that the monster was on his way, and the nearer he drew, the more events like this we ought to expect.

  On the other hand, he’s almost made it to town—and the worst he can do is kill us all, and then it’d all be over.

  I laughed at the thought. Alone in my cluttered, increasingly musty, and foul-smelling parlor, I laughed out loud and then sobered quickly, because laughing aloud, alone, in dirty rooms is what madmen do. I had this much awareness about me, still. I thought of my scissors, and then I wondered where my scissors were located in this jumbled wreck of a house. Couldn’t think of where they might be. At first I was angry with myself, for having allowed my living circumstances to come to this. But then I found this thought reassuring, for if I couldn’t find them, then I couldn’t stab myself in the eyes, now could I?

  You see? Madness, creeping in around the edges.

  So soft, so subtle, that it goes unnoticed until you try to speak the process aloud. For now, when I hear my own words pronounced in my own voice, I recognize the insanity for what it surely is. For now, I am able to draw myself back from that precipice.

  “I was angry because I did not know where I had placed my scissors, because I might need them. I might be required to stab myself in the eyes.”

  I suppose the next step will be more difficult. Next, I will need to hear someone else speak aloud before I recognize how strange I have become. I need to spend more time at Maplecroft. I need to visit with the ladies there, for they are the only ones who will know when I go mad—and who will know the difference between confused and afflicted, and gone beyond all hope of retrieval.

  Or perhaps I ought to avoid them altogether. At this rate, I do not know how much longer I will be a help to them, and how soon the transition might make me a danger to them.

  • • •

  Ah, you see? I just read that last short paragraph aloud, and it made sense. I am still here. I am still sane. I am still a knight of this place, this town, that house. Not prisoner, but sentry. Though I didn’t do much to preserve or protect Nance.

  Since we lost her, and all.

  • • •

  I should’ve skipped the viewing of the soggy and departed Mrs. Easley. I should’ve gone directly to Maplecroft, but I didn’t. After leaving that scen
e I should’ve proceeded straight to that marvelous mansion wherein I might find kindred spirits, but something had sent me home first, instead—a niggling worry that Wolf might send some kind of word, and then I’d miss it.

  He’d sent no word.

  And I laughed alone in my parlor, and then headed to Maplecroft. On the way there, I met the Bordens’ neighbor boy. He was out of breath, running full speed, his pockets much enriched by how many messages he’d passed between us over these last few weeks.

  He wheezed, “Miss Borden sends for you, sir. A change in your patient, she says.”

  I didn’t know if he meant Emma or Nance, but either way, it probably wasn’t good. I hoped it was Nance, and I felt briefly bad for doing so. But I know Emma better, and I find her more useful. Ever since her descent into a fugue state, Nance had become useful only as a specimen, which must sound cold; but the whole world is cold, and how else am I to learn, except to observe?

  I hoped that Nance hadn’t experienced some catastrophic change since the afternoon before, when last I’d seen her, but the boy’s frantic presence suggested otherwise. I hoped Lizzie or Emma could provide me with strictly accurate details about any changes I’d missed, assuming still that we were not speaking of Emma.

  Lizzie could enlighten me with regard to all I’d missed, or so I comforted myself as I made the dash to her home.

  On the way, the sky began to spit intermittent gobs of rain. The air felt like tepid bathwater, and everyone sweated and shined, despite the lack of excessive heat. I hated running in the thick, wet air, but I ran anyway—never pausing to respond to greetings, short queries, or other inane interruptions hurled at me from the sidewalks and doorways.

  By the time I arrived, I was soaked.

  Lizzie had been watching for me; she flung the door open before I could knock, and she drew me inside with surprising vigor for such a small woman. “In here,” she said breathlessly, pulling me by my arm through the parlor. A loud clap of thunder sounded outside, lending an ominous air to something already so ominous that I shuddered to consider what awaited me . . . but sometimes the weather knows things, and we would all be ill-advised to ignore its warnings.

  The house was dark, though it was only late afternoon. Or was it later? It felt later. How long had I stood alone in my house, laughing at myself? At the gods?

  The clouds had closed like curtains, and there was no sun at all. But in Maplecroft, the lights were not yet switched on.

  “She’s in the basement. Oh God,” she continued.

  “I thought you’d barred it.”

  “I did.”

  I believed her, but the door was open now—kicked inward, or bashed that way. A great dent sank the middle of it, and the hinges were crooked, barely clutching the frame. “Did she do that?” I asked.

  “She must have. But I didn’t see. I only heard.”

  “Where’s Emma?”

  “I don’t know,” she said offhandedly, and that worried me—or it would have, if I had any further room for worry. If Lizzie wasn’t concerned, I couldn’t afford to be concerned, either. “Here, down here, you see?”

  And I did see.

  The laboratory was lit up, not quite bright but at least some of the lights were burning, unlike the upstairs. The illumination had a sickly, greenish glow to it—one I’d never seen before, or had never noticed, at any rate. Was it ordinary for gaslights to cast such a shade? Probably not. Probably nothing was ordinary anymore, and this was the veritable nexus for all the extraordinary things for miles and miles around.

  The walls were wet; rivulets of water cascaded here and there, pooling on the floor and draining through the boards. The water smelled like brine and death, like low tide after some great mammal has beached itself and expired. Just as Ebenezer Hamilton had told me.

  All the tables were overturned, which inexplicably annoyed me; all the floorboards at one side of the room had been lifted up—for Nance had been searching for something again, but not the stones. Not this time.

  She stood barefoot and naked, staring down into a hole.

  Watery light washed over her, and her skin looked like the hide of a dolphin, slick and neither dark nor pale, but muted. She was the wrong color. Her body was not quite the wrong shape, but there was something wrong about it all the same. She didn’t turn to look at me, and she didn’t respond when Lizzie called her name.

  She didn’t move at all except to wiggle her toes at the edge of that precipice, where I realized with a sudden jolt of horror that the cooker was waiting for her.

  Its lid was open. Its dials and buttons were alight, and its contents hummed and smelled terrible. Of course they did. The cooker was ready to cook. It’d been primed and warmed, full of lye and whatever else might turn flesh and bone into syrup, and Nance was staring down into it, as if she were prepared to make a swan dive into that shallow contraption.

  “Nance,” I tried.

  She didn’t answer me, any more than she’d answered her lover.

  Lizzie tried again, and then reached for her—but the girl’s arm lashed out and threw the other woman backward, crashing into a fallen table. It was too light a gesture for such a magnificent blow, too quick and flippant to have cast her across the room, but there it was. Lizzie gasped and clutched her stomach, but I could see she was not badly hurt. She was stunned, and this was not the first time Nance had cast her aside. I could see that, too.

  “Nance, what are you doing?” I asked, thinking a question might prompt more response than a mere call of her name.

  I was right.

  “Fighting,” she whispered.

  “You’re . . . you’re fighting? Fighting what?”

  “Him.”

  Lizzie climbed to her feet; I heard her behind me, gathering her wits and hauling herself upright. But my eyes were fixed on this girl, bare as the day she was born. Tall, and I don’t suppose I’d ever really noticed it. Sturdy, like she’d grown up with manual labor. Had they mentioned something about it? A farm girl, I wanted to say, but wouldn’t have sworn to it.

  “Nance, don’t listen to him,” Lizzie pleaded. “Stay here, for the love of God!”

  “I’m trying,” she replied.

  Lizzie began to cry. Not a delicate cry that could be conquered with a handkerchief, but more of a manly, racking sob that was so full of rage and sorrow that I felt it like a wave, pushing me forward.

  I let it push me one step, then another. I was not within arm’s reach of Nance, no—not quite that close. But I was closer, and she hadn’t moved to evade me, or attack me. “Lizzie’s right,” I told her. “You mustn’t listen to him.”

  “I know,” she said. It came out bubbly, like she’d said it underwater, or perhaps her lungs were full of slime.

  I commanded her, “Back away from that cooker. It’ll be the death of you, and you know it.”

  She agreed, and seemed curiously at peace. “That’s what he says. He says it will kill me.”

  “Then back away.”

  Her head turned, slowly, a slick pivot on her neck that made all the bones look loose beneath her dolphin-wet skin. She looked me in the eye, and for a span of seconds, I saw her wrestling with something. It flickered back and forth, a white milkiness behind her pupils—and the sharp knowledge of the woman whose soul must somehow remain inside.

  She was fighting, yes. Just as she’d said.

  I said it again: “Step away from the cooker.”

  She sneered, but it was not contempt. It was a twisting of her mouth that she couldn’t quite control—more of a spasm than an expression. And she said, “I should save you. I should jump. But he says . . .” She struggled to line up every word, I could hear it in the precision with which she pronounced each individual letter.

  “I don’t understand,” I told her.

  “I know.” She nodded, and again it looked like her joints were fastening and unfastening, her bones sliding around, rearranging themselves.

  Lizzie swallowed a sob and screamed, �
�Stay with me!”

  Then, with a sharp flicker of sorrow, Nance made her decision—or had it made for her. “He won’t let me save you. Won’t let me jump.” She looked at Lizzie now, directly and without blinking. Like the others, she wasn’t blinking anymore. Calm and level, but so unhappy I could feel it in my own bones, when she said, “Or stay.”

  Nance shook her head and withdrew, stepping away.

  More thunder rollicked through the clouds. It climaxed with a crack so loud that when the lightning came, it was bright enough to illuminate the whole house. Some of it even trickled downstairs, to us. Some of it set the room on fire, and for half a second—maybe less—everything was so clear, so bright.

  • • •

  Nance looked up when the lightning flashed again upstairs, though this time I hadn’t heard the thunder that preceded it. It flashed and sizzled, and Maplecroft smelled like ozone and fire. It crackled through the house, the loudest white you’ve ever seen.

  The lights went out. The lights came on again.

  The cooker was empty. And Nance was gone.

  Lizzie Andrew Borden

  MAY 7, 1894

  Nance was gone, and I stood there—wondering if my eyes had deceived me, or if I’d finally succumbed to the madness of Fall River, or if perhaps I was simply mistaken about what had occurred.

  I tumbled forward—nearly toppling into the cooker myself—but I found no sign of her. The lye and its accompanying chemicals did not simmer or writhe with bubbles as if they’d been disturbed, they only swirled and hummed with the motion of the motor, spinning and whirring, ready to devour anything that might fall. This flytrap of a machine. There in my floor. It was empty, except for the liquids that do its job.

  Nance had gone somewhere else.

  I flung myself toward the far wall, where the switch controlled the gaslights—and I twisted it hard enough to break the knob, but the light didn’t brighten and Nance was still gone.

  Corner to corner I scanned the room and saw only the usual bits of equipment, paraphernalia, tables, stools, glass vials, books, burners, measuring cups and spoons, scraps of notepaper, lists of trials and errors. In the corner, a broom. Against the wall, my axe. No, not the axe after all, for it was upstairs. I hadn’t known she’d be coming down here again, so I hadn’t brought it.