Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  No, not Emma after all. Emma did not see my blow, for she was unconscious. She’d slipped down to the floor, folded over like a ragdoll cast aside. Beneath her face, a dribble of blood and saliva pooled. Her gore-soaked hair was sticking to the floorboards, and her eyes were not quite closed.

  But I couldn’t rush to her side. Not yet.

  I was transfixed by the axe, even as he pulled it free of his skull and tossed it out of my immediate reach. He clutched the wound it left behind, and blood the color of tar squeezed out from between his fingers.

  I grabbed at the table and used it to pull myself up, knocking it over in the process.

  But then I lunged at Doctor Phillip Zollicoffer, who had once sent us friendly notes about crustaceans and cephalopods, and had mailed us a box of chocolates shaped like seashells at Christmas, and had murdered countless people, lost his mind, his humanity, his soul—if I could bring myself to believe in souls anymore.

  I lunged for him because somehow, he had killed Nance, and in some way he’d killed me, too. What on earth was left for me without her? A sister who loathed me, and a daft doctor who only wanted to help? There was nothing left worth counting.

  I lunged for him, and I caught him in the torso, where his skin was peeling, crackling, and turning black. The toxin was still working, still weakening him. I took it as encouragement. I needed some. I needed something other than the press of his horrible body, and the stink of his skin corroding before my eyes.

  Still holding on to his broken head, he pushed back with his shoulder, absorbing some of my momentum—but I shoved him again, with all my weight. Together we fell over the upended table—him backward, me atop him—and he tried to catch himself. He extended his free hand, and landed on it. Not half an inch beside the cooker.

  He teetered. The edge so close he must’ve been able to smell the lye and the heat.

  He leaned, and tried to roll away.

  He released his grip on his head wound, and blood gushed forth . . . or if not blood, then something thicker than that. Whatever weird oil went through his veins, it splattered the room, the table, the floor, and the cooker.

  Hastily he scrambled, the long pianist fingers clawing at the floor. The nails breaking, splitting. The fingers bleeding, dragging themselves up and down against the table, which lay on its side and blocked his escape. He scuttled on the floor, half-blinded by the fluids that drained from his head.

  He was trapped between the table and the cooker. Between me, and the precious few weapons at my disposal. (The devil and the deep blue sea.)

  I braced myself behind the table, planting my shoulder and my knee against it. (My laboratory. My table. My sword, my shield.) I threw all my weight against it, and it scooted—not even a foot. Not even another foot, when I pushed it again.

  But it was enough.

  I forced Zollicoffer back against the cooker’s precipice, and past it, and over the edge.

  Hip-first he splashed down, and the lye solution cascaded—eroding and consuming, sizzling against his skin. It splashed and frothed wildly as he wrestled to escape, but I was behind the table, pushing it atop him, hounding him, hiding from the worst of the deadly acid spray.

  Even as he bathed in the cooker, he was not finished yet. With a burst of strength, he seized the table and broke it—more by accident than design, I think. He was flailing; these were his death throes.

  (But they were formidable, violent throes, and I knew all too well that I might not survive them.)

  Lye sloshed onto the floor, and spattered the room. Without the table’s protective barrier, I got spattered, too, though I scarcely felt it at first.

  His hand seized my ankle, and he nearly pulled me into the cooker alongside him. But his energy waned. He only pulled me down, only to the edge, with those bony hands that had lost most of their skin—and were reduced to knuckles and tendons and twiggy phalanges exposed to the air.

  He only brought me within kicking range.

  I shoved my foot against his face and tried not to see how that face was melting, and how my foot scraped off a rag of skin from his forehead.

  He released me. He leaned back, his mouth open to scream. His tongue withered, and writhed.

  I dove for the cupboard door, refusing to look back—refusing to watch what I was doing—and I lifted it up, so I could close it down on top of him.

  Or I tried to close it.

  One of his arms and one leg refused to be contained, though the rest of his body thrashed in the cooker’s belly; still, even as it ate him alive, he sought to drown me, too, in the depths of the machine, if not in the ocean, where he would take Emma. Where somehow he’d taken Nance.

  Where we all came from. Where we all were going.

  I climbed atop the cupboard door and held it upon him, using what little leverage I had to offer; and when Seabury finally appeared at the top of the steps, crying my name and Emma’s . . . I screamed for him to join me.

  • • •

  (He did not attempt to rescue the madman, thank God. He did not try to feed me to the cooker. He was not mad after all. Not that mad, anyway. Not that kind of mad, at least. Not so mad that he did not know himself, and who his friends were.)

  • • •

  Together the good doctor and I held him down, and in time, there was not enough left of Zollicoffer to move those stray appendages.

  He stopped fighting.

  The only thrashing came from the chemicals, given so much work to do. The only protests came from the floorboards, all of them near the cooker ruined by the acids. The only burns and stains left were on my arms, and my knees where I’d knelt in the puddles.

  We opened the lid, just enough to shove the rest of him inside, and the straggling scraps of his corpse disappeared, sank, and began their dissolution into liquid.

  Seabury and I laid ourselves down on the cupboard door, holding it down with our bodies, not believing it was enough. Not until we stopped panting and caught our breath, and realized that there was no more thunder. There were no more cries from beneath the ocean, crashing over the land, rumbling across the sky. The house was dark. The basement was darker still, or it would’ve been, except for the pitiful sizzle of one lone gas lamp that struggled against the shadows.

  • • •

  Seabury carried Emma upstairs and tended to her while I bathed, discovering new injuries, new burns, with every swipe of the washcloth.

  The water made me scream, and I chewed through my bottom lip trying to contain myself, to hold in all the pain. My blood tasted like pocket change. The burns and welts blistered, and seared, and stung like brimstone on my forearms and ankles.

  My skin rose, and puckered.

  I soaked myself in the tub where Nance had drowned but did not die, and I did not think of her floating hair and her waterlogged skin. I did not remember the touch of her lips on mine, her hands on mine, her body on mine. I held the soap and I held the rag, and I washed and washed and washed until my fingers were prunes and the water had gone cold.

  Nothing was clean.

  Nothing was finished. Everything was merely over.

  Inspector Simon Wolf

  JULY 4, 1895

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—EIGHTH STREET OFFICE POST-FIELD REPORT

  It is true that my initial reports were sparse; but given the deaths across the state prior to the Fall River Event, my attention and my resources were stretched perilously thin. Even a man of my size can’t reach from the northern boundary to the ocean—not when scores of grisly murders lingered on the docket, each incident demanding investigation and assessment. If I had been allowed to proceed directly to Fall River, once it became clear that this was the locus of whatever occurred, I might have been able to offer a better understanding of how and why so many have died in the stretch between August of 1892 and May of 1894.

  As things stand, all I could do was send warning to my contacts there. I gave them all the time to ready themselves that I could. If you’d allowed me to raise a few
good men to assist at Maplecroft, they might have been readier still.

  Maybe a small force would’ve changed the outcome there, and maybe not. But it was cruel of you to prevent me from giving it a try.

  I realize that some of my superiors would quarrel with my dates, but I will insist with my dying breath that Abigail and Andrew Borden were the start of this. Perhaps not the center of it, no, but a catalyst of some kind. Somehow, they were the first.

  I cannot say for certain, as I was not present for their murders or the subsequent trial—though I’ve studied the court transcripts forward and backward. I’ve found nothing to contradict my conclusions, and plenty to support them. I know the captain calls the details “circumstantial,” but he’s mistaken, and I believe he might’ve been behind the sincere and deliberate effort to keep me away from that setting, even in the wake of the Hamilton case.

  He thought I was on the wrong track, and wasting resources. He was mistaken about that, too. Now, I suppose, he’s making an effort to save face.

  I won’t have it.

  I was forced to lobby vehemently to address Ebenezer Hamilton with any specific authority, and this should not have been the case. No permission ought to have been required. I should have set off without questions or bureaucracy standing between myself and the answers we needed.

  The present hierarchy is worse than inconvenient: It is incompetent. I can scarcely believe the organization took so long to classify these crimes as falling within our jurisdiction, when they were so clearly beyond the understood geometry of mankind.

  Due to our consistent, solid, reproducible results, we have enjoyed the indulgence of the Boston law enforcement for this long—but the day may come when they realize what we are, and what we do. If we delay too long (as in this Fall River catastrophe), or fail too much (and greatly did we fail in this particular matter) . . . then the day may come when we are revealed as being too strange for them. They will blame us for the very horrors we seek to solve and remedy. They will cast us out like witches—and that’s if we’re lucky.

  But I digress.

  Something tells me you’ll stop reading there and begin swearing aloud, calling for Miss Ellen to seek me out and fire me on the spot . . . but you really shouldn’t. After all, I’m about to answer the laundry list of questions you put forth, in the wake of my initial response—wherein you called my research “incomplete” and my notes “full of holes.” Of course it was incomplete and aerated; I was given neither the time nor the support to provide the fuller picture you ostensibly desired. If you actually wanted to see the scope of this thing, you should’ve left me to my own devices.

  I have always performed best that way, and you damned well know it.

  • • •

  With regard to Nance O’Neil, actress and woman of dubious moral fiber: No trace has yet been found, and I’d be astonished if that ever changes. I know her manager does not wish to hear my recommendation, but he can get in a very long line, I suppose—because here it is: She ought to be declared dead, and perhaps have a memorial plaque installed upon some theater house, somewhere, if people really cannot let it go.

  The girl is gone. Whatever came for her, took her—and won’t likely be persuaded to give her back.

  According to the Borden sisters, she’d been ailing for some time before she vanished. Sleepwalking! That was their feeble explanation, and they had no plans to tell me the truth; that much was clear. And what could I possibly do about it? Argue? Threaten? Hardly a gentleman’s response to the younger Borden’s clear and authentic anguish. Besides, she may not really know. Being a witness to something and fully understanding it are hardly the same thing.

  For that matter, it wouldn’t be a chivalrous response to the elder sister, either, though Emma lends the impression that she’s almost glad to be rid of Miss O’Neil. Whatever happened in that house, to that girl, wherever she’s gone . . . Emma knows as much of the answer as anyone (however little that may be), but she’ll speak of it no sooner than Lizzie.

  Regardless of this bond of silence, Emma has no further interest in remaining in her sister’s care. When last I spoke with her, she was in the process of moving out . . . undertaking the endeavor despite (or because of) a precipitous decline in her already meager strength. Apparently, she’s made arrangements for herself at a health care facility in Providence. She offered no explanation for this, and Lizzie declined to supplement my understanding beyond a vague suggestion that Emma required more intensive care than she could provide at Maplecroft.

  Something has happened between them, and maybe that something was Miss O’Neil, or maybe it was something else. Maybe the Fall River Event was more than their bond could stand. Maybe it was never a very tight bond to begin with. The age difference between them is something like ten or eleven years; their relationship was probably always a bit odd for siblings.

  I overheard Emma curtly inform Lizzie that she intends to send letters. I guess we’ll see how their future works out. Sometimes, a bit of distance can help. Sometimes, it’s easier to write things down and mail them than to have the most difficult conversations in person.

  I hope they do correspond, given the obvious sorrow and loneliness of the notorious Lizzie Borden, or Andrew, or whatever she’s calling herself these days. (Sometimes she appropriates some version of her father’s name, for the sake of anonymity—or something like it.) I do believe the woman is guilty of her parents’ murders, but there’s no proving it now . . . and if I could, I might not be inclined to. She isn’t just hiding something. She’s protecting something, perhaps with very good reason.

  Something or someone. Herself? The town? Doctor Seabury?

  You tell me.

  Speaking of Seabury, since you asked about his state as well, I wish I had better news. I noted previously that his mind was slipping, and that I had concerns about his continued involvement in these events—not that there was any good way to remove him from the situation. The ladies of Maplecroft took him into their confidence at the start of this affair, and could not (or would not) extricate him from it. If anything, he’s been their sole friend and confidant these last couple of years.

  But when I asked after him, Emma could scarcely bring herself to say his name. When she did, it was with a bitter gleam in her eyes. That woman is leaving town, and she’s not looking back. I’m not sure I blame her.

  (Do what you must; that’s what I say. But then, I rather liked her. I wish her well, for all that my wishing can do for her.)

  But Seabury. His state. When I finally caught up to him for coffee, it was clear that he’s slipping yet further, and I’m not sure how it’ll end.

  He’s unlikely to recover from whatever ailment plagues his mind—experience has taught us that, if little else. He remains mostly sequestered in his own home, rearranging the furniture and muttering to himself, pretending that all is well and he’s cleaning house, or searching for some long-lost documents belonging to his late wife, or . . . or whatever excuse he reaches most easily these days. The man is building a fort, and he means to live the rest of his days barricaded inside it.

  Lizzie makes a routine effort to engage him, visiting with cooked meals or merely companionship; but from what I saw, it’s almost entirely one-sided. Only once in a while will Seabury rouse himself and notice she’s present—at which point he’ll begin to chatter wildly about all the preparations and warnings yet to be made before “mother” arrives.

  God only knows what he’s talking about. His mother’s been dead for decades.

  Well, God and Lizzie Borden, perhaps. She’s patient with him, gentle and kind. Especially now that her sister is leaving, she has no one else to interact with, really. I suppose it’s him or nobody.

  Apart from her routine visits to the doctor in his makeshift fortress, she rarely leaves Maplecroft. She sits on her porch, which has been customized all the better to hide her—that she can rest outside in the fresh ocean air without being seen. She feeds and watches the birds, and she
feeds and watches the stray cats—that the cats might leave the birds in peace. She reads the newspapers, and whatever books she orders from the library. She waits for Nance O’Neil, who will not return, and she waits on Owen Seabury, who will never leave.

  If anyone knows the true shape and scope of what occurred in Fall River, it’s her—but she doesn’t know or trust me well enough to share that burden. She carries it around instead, as if it’s more than ill cargo: it’s a duty. Her duty. Her penance, maybe, for her transgressions carried out since the axe first hit her father. (Or was it her mother—stepmother—she struck first? I’ll be damned if I can recall. At any rate, you know what I mean.)

  I am satisfied that I know some vague outline of what’s taken place, and I know it better than you ever might—not because I’m unwilling to give you the information, but because you’re unwilling to receive it. You asked me to investigate, and I investigated. I can’t help it if you don’t like the results. The facts are the facts, warped and strange and uncertain though they might be. I’d know more of them if you had given me room to find them.

  But I’m finished complaining about that. I’m finished complaining about you, and the organization, and the lack of support combined with the rise in demands. I’m done, do you hear me? Give me the freedom and resources to do my job, or cut me loose.

  Perhaps I can be of greater service to mankind without you.

  Yrs,

  SW