Maplecroft, Page 3

  I told her she shouldn’t watch or listen for such things, that it wasn’t polite. She pointed out that it was difficult not to watch or listen, given that the house was scarcely twenty yards away from our own, and if they wished to keep their problems private, they could close the windows or leave the city for their negotiations.

  Then she said that in fact, Emma Borden had done just that. She’d packed up her things and called a carriage, and that was the last anyone had seen of her. (Somehow, this had escaped my notice, too.)

  For that matter, William had left town as well a week previously—not entirely of his own accord. Andrew’s influence had persuaded the authorities to become more aggressively involved, and the young man had vanished without returning.

  Assuming this was the case, only Andrew, Abigail, and the younger daughter were left in the house. No wonder things had quieted. I hoped this meant the end, and that their lives could return to normal.

  Surely if left in peace, the remaining Bordens would sort out their differences and their health would be restored.

  • • •

  I’ll never forget the night of August 3. I wish I could—but I’ve played it over in my head a thousand times, and it’s burned there like a book of photographs, flipped together to make a moving scene.

  It was late, but my wife and I were still up. We were turning down the wicks and extinguishing the gas lamps, settling in for the night when we heard a loud thump downstairs against our front door, followed by a gruesome wail that sounded part human, part drowning animal.

  My wife was alarmed, but I told her not to panic and I lit another lantern to carry downstairs. “Stay here!” I commanded over my shoulder. It wasn’t necessary. She’d already thrown herself into the water closet and locked the door.

  Down the stairs I rushed, stumbling over my slippers and wincing with every pound upon the door. They weren’t the ordinary knockings of a late-night visitor, or the frantic beating of a desperate patient—a noise I knew quite well, after a career of delivering babies and attending the dying.

  Instead it was a low, dull thud repeated without rhythm, and the cry came with it again. I wanted to shut my ears against the bellowing yowl, but I forced myself down the corridor. And there, shadowed in the colored glass of the small-framed window, I saw a shape flinging itself heavily, repeatedly, against the front door.

  I froze, reconsidering my decision to answer. Whatever struggled on the other side couldn’t be human, could it? But then I heard one word and my resolve quickened.

  “Help.”

  A woman’s voice. Garbled, even in that single syllable. But recognizable.

  “Help us,” she tried again, and I rushed toward the door.

  I flung it open and held up my lantern. There she was, Abigail Borden—for all that I scarcely recognized her. How long had it been since I’d seen her? This change could not have dropped upon her overnight. What kind of failure was I as a physician and neighbor that this ghastly transformation had eluded me?

  Her skin looked like that of a waterlogged corpse, doughy and far too white. She seemed swollen, and her hair was wild around her shoulders, falling down her back in seaweed tangles.

  I croaked at her, “Mrs. Borden!” though there was no good reason I shouldn’t have used her first name. I’d known her as “Abigail” for years, but this did not seem like her, for all that I knew it must be. I wanted to impose some distance between myself and this woman. Something was wrong. Any fool could see it. Even me.

  I stammered again, “Mrs. Borden—what on earth is the matter?”

  Her eyes met mine and they were rheumy and too large for their sockets, with surprise or stress or horror. She said, “It’s poison, I think.” Every word was thick in her mouth, and I wondered if she hadn’t been drinking. I struggled to convince myself of any new cause—alcohol? laudanum? Dependency could change a person terribly; this much I knew. I clung to this explanation of what stood swaying before me.

  “Poison?”

  She was unstable on her feet. I should’ve reached for her, taken her arm and steadied her.

  In my career I’ve had my hands upon more revolting bodies than a layman is likely to encounter in a lifetime of trying. I’ve squeezed boils, soaked my hands in blood and pus, slipped in entrails, swaddled slippery stillborns, and pulled excrement from unwilling bowels by hand.

  But I did not want to touch that woman. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

  • • •

  All my oaths were failed in that night.

  • • •

  I opened my mouth to tell her something. Anything. A consolation, a suggestion. I have no idea what might’ve spewed forth if I’d had the opportunity to speak, but I was interrupted by a voice from across the road.

  A low voice, another woman. Steady and authoritative. Firm and reassuring.

  It was the younger Borden daughter, Lizzie. She stood on the front porch watching her stepmother shudder and beg before me. With just enough subtle volume to carry the short distance between us, she commanded, “Mrs. Borden, come back inside.”

  Abigail’s eyes widened yet further, until a seam of white showed all around her night-blackened pupils. Slowly she swiveled her head to look back at her house, at her stepdaughter.

  The moon and the corner gaslight showed Lizzie in shades of gray, tinted yellow. She was motionless. She might have been an apparition, or a daguerreotype. I could not say that her face was blank, for that would be untrue; I should say instead that she did not appear conflicted. Even given the distance and darkness between us, I could see that she had come to some resolution.

  (Though it’s easy for me to speak that way in retrospect, and it’s possible I did not perceive any of this. I may only be coloring the past with my knowledge of what was to come.)

  I said, “Mrs. Borden?” and she pivoted to regard me once more, unblinking.

  For a very short flash—only an instant—her features shifted, as if her old self had seized control in order to speak.

  She told me then, in that narrow window between fright and madness, “We’re done for, you know. Whatever happens now, we won’t be saved.”

  Then she backed away, nearly tripping over the top porch stair but catching herself at the last moment. She retreated without unlocking her gaze from my face until she reached the street, at which point she trudged back up to her own home and let Lizzie usher her inside.

  As Lizzie closed the door, she too met my eyes. I saw only her certainty, and the moon’s cold reflection. And then nothing at all, as they both disappeared inside.

  Confused and unaccountably afraid, I lingered, with the wind gusting into my own house, flapping the curtains and rattling the leaves on the young rubber plant that shivered in the hallway.

  My wife called out, “Dearest?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

  I shut the door and locked it, then in a fit of lunatic whimsy, I pushed the potted plant in front of the door. It slid against it with the dragging, grating scrape of unfinished ceramics. And it did nothing to make me feel less afraid.

  • • •

  The next morning, Abigail and Andrew Jackson Borden were found hacked to death. It’s a well-known story by now.

  Lizzie was the closest thing to a witness, and she said almost nothing. She’d found them, yes. Her father downstairs on the couch, reclined as if he’d been napping and caught unawares. Her stepmother upstairs in the spare bedroom, sprawled facedown on the floor.

  Before the house swarmed with police and investigators, reporters and curiosity seekers, I was summoned by the maid, who arrived in a firestorm of tears, wails, and blubbered protestations. She was an Irish girl; Maggie was her name—or that’s all I ever heard them call her. She tugged on my arm when I opened the door, and she drew me across the street, telling me everything between gasps and gulps.

  And I went, with all the dread of the previous evening foremost in my mind, weighing down my feet as I plodded the few scant
yards over to my neighbors’ bloody abode.

  The day was bright and hot. The sun bleached out all the colors, and some of the details, almost as badly as the night had just a few hours previously. And there was Lizzie, standing on the front porch waiting for me. Her mouth was fixed in a grim line, and her eyes squinted against the brilliant light of morning.

  Just above her feet I saw dark stains spreading in a violent red against the light brown shade of her dress. She would later say, before a judge and jury, that her hem had become bloody when she stood beside the corpses, attempting to examine or rouse them.

  (And at that same trial, I would testify on her behalf. I would recall the brown dress, and I would swear that the blood on her clothes was consistent with a concerned, frightened woman who’d approached the Bordens with intent to assist them.)

  As I approached she said, “Doctor Seabury, my father and Mrs. Borden are dead. Something has killed them.”

  • • •

  Much difficulty followed.

  I was called upon to testify, as were many others. I would speak again and again of her dress and the blood, and my neighbors bashed open with the thick, heavy blade.

  Lizzie comported herself admirably. She remained ladylike and reasonable, and she answered the prosecutor’s questions so long as he asked them—always presenting a picture of calm cooperation, and only becoming slightly scrambled under the barrage of confusing questions. He worked hard to trip her, to compel her to incriminate herself.

  She stuck to her story, and neither the witnesses nor the lawyers were able to rattle her into guilty confessions.

  It was just as well. No one really wanted to believe she’d done it.

  Was she physically capable of committing the murders?

  No doubt. She was only thirty-two, and sturdily built. Her father was in his seventies. Her stepmother, although younger, was taken from behind, presumably by surprise.

  But there was no one to satisfactorily accuse Lizzie. Maggie refused to condemn her, and none of the other witnesses could convince the jury that she had a motive for such horrendous acts. The small things added up to only more small things. The daily, petty gripes of a mixed household and Lizzie’s cold behavior toward her stepmother . . . they seemed to fall within the parameters of reasonableness, if not pleasantness.

  Nothing emerged to make Lizzie appear to the court like a monster gone mad, and so she was not convicted. She collected her inheritance, after the much-discussed “will” failed to materialize; and shortly thereafter, she and her sister, Emma, relocated together to the other side of town.

  They purchased a large, beautiful home and they named it Maplecroft.

  Phillip Zollicoffer, Professor of Biology, Miskatonic University

  ONE YEAR PREVIOUS

  APRIL 15, 1893

  It arrived yesterday, though I did not have the opportunity to open and examine it until this afternoon. The package came wrapped in brown paper and twine, directed to myself with a return address of Fall River, Massachusetts.

  Immediately I knew it had originated in the office of my distant colleague, Dr. E. A. Jackson—a knowledgeable fellow biologist, though now retired (or so I believed).

  We began our correspondence in 1890, after I published a paper on a new strain of nuisance seaweed that was clogging beaches and boat-screws up and down the eastern seaboard. (I argued that it was a previously unknown subspecies of a common aquatic varietal and was experiencing an outrageous bloom.)

  Dr. Jackson sent me a letter telling me how much he appreciated my diagnosis of the situation, and how he was additionally impressed by the thoroughness of my research. I was flattered, as any man might be, and I responded with my thanks. He wrote again with a question regarding a particular crustacean he’d found at the ocean’s edge—a creature I later deemed to be a grotesque lobster, dwarfed and otherwise congenitally deformed—and since then, the conversation has scarcely ceased. From time to time, we even send each other samples and articles.

  This package was one such sample, I assumed; and when the time finally presented itself, I closed my door and sat at my desk, reaching for a small pair of scissors to snip the string.

  Within the brown paper I found a box. Within this box I found a large mason jar sealed with a screw-on lid, which had been furthermore made airtight with a blue wax seal. The glass was large enough to hold a significant sample, something bigger than my own hand. But in the dim light of my stuffy, book-lined office, I could not at first tell what was hidden inside.

  I rested the jar atop two of my research volumes, and went in search of a second lamp. Shortly I found one, though it was low on oil, and I brought it over to my seat in order to illuminate my workspace.

  Lifting the jar up to the light, I noted first that it was quite heavy. The contents sloshed very slightly, indicating a high water percentage, and through the thick container gleamed a dull ivory color. The sample was too dark to be called off-white, and too light to be called brown—with seams of a sickly blue (or perhaps green) swirling through the whole.

  As to its shape, I’d be hard-pressed to say. Crammed as it was inside the container, it had no shape at all except that which it borrowed from the jar. But it was lumpy and gelatinous, that much I could see. Could it be some odd representative of Cnidaria?

  I turned it over in my hand.

  Yes, possibly. Some sea-jelly, though nothing I’d seen before.

  At the bottom of the box a folded letter lurked. I set the vial aside and retrieved the heavy-stock paper, and flapping it open, I read:

  Dear Dr. Zollicoffer,

  I trust this missive finds you well. I’m including with this message a strange . . . substance? Creature? Glob of fauna? Honestly, I’m at a loss. I found it along the Atlantic coast not a mile from my home, as I was on the shore with my sister—who was assisting me.

  (My physician, Doctor Seabury, suggests that I should do my best to remain active despite my encroaching infirmity. He thinks that the ocean air will do me well, and I believe he’s right. I always feel invigorated after these strolls. As to my sister’s presence in the tale—she is ten years my junior, and in far better health than I. Thus I enlist her aid for these excursions.)

  I must forewarn you, this item has an odious scent which will become apparent the moment you release the seal. The texture also is abhorrent, and I recommend that you handle it only with the sturdiest of gloves—preferably gloves you can afford to discard. I ruined a very fine pair manipulating this awful thing, and I wouldn’t wish that upon you.

  At any rate, because it is such a curiosity, I thought I might pass it along. I have not preserved it in any solution, only taking care to seal out the air. I hope it hasn’t spoiled further during transit, though given how awful it smelled when fresh, I’m not entirely certain how one would know the difference.

  To my own casual inspection, it strikes me as possibly some peculiar form of Anthomedusae—or a corrupted polyp-stage example of the same? I understand these medusas sometimes grow in colonies, so perhaps I’ve only passed along some decomposing cluster of ordinary sea-jellies. If this is the case, I do apologize.

  But I could not help but feel that this is something different, and stranger. I hope that if nothing else, you find it an interesting puzzle.

  (My sister says I’m mad, and that you will no doubt cease all correspondence with me immediately upon receiving this. I believe she’s just unhappy about the odor that lingers in the kitchen.)

  E.A.J.

  I examined the jar, holding it carefully between my hands. With only the lamplight to judge it by, few details presented themselves.

  By my right elbow I kept an oversized magnifying glass in a jointed frame. I seized it and drew it forward, adjusting its screws to aim the lens at the jar’s contents. Here and there, bubbles bobbed back and forth as I turned it about. They moved with a weird, low squish that would have disinclined me to unscrew the top had I been any other kind of scientist.

  But I located a
letter opener—sharp but not dangerous, and perfect for cutting through the seal—and I set upon the container with great gusto, determined to liberate the contents despite Dr. Jackson’s warnings.

  In another five minutes I had a desk covered with pale, curled scrapings of wax, and the lid was ready to be twisted. I braced myself, rising up out of my chair for added leverage. With a bend of my elbow I threw my strength against the jar and the lid shifted a quarter of an inch, breaking the seal that preserved the contents within.

  My colleague had not exaggerated the reek.

  I was genuinely astonished. The scent oozed and drifted from the jar, crawling up into my eyes. They watered. My nose stung. I could feel the stench in the back of my throat.

  But I’d come this far and I was determined to proceed, though at this point it occurred to me that I had no gloves handy and was proceeding with naked fingers.

  Alas. Nothing to be done about it now.

  I struggled onward, pivoting the lid with my wrist and yanking it away with a flourish that sent foul-smelling slime streaking across my desk and one of my bookshelves, but no matter! The moment was upon me!

  Before I could stare too closely, I flailed for the handkerchief in my jacket pocket and thrust it up to my face, for all the good it did. I held the jar at arm’s distance and peered through the glass, doing my best to detect the contents without bringing my nose too close to the source.

  As a good biologist, I ought to catalog even that, I suppose—outrageously unpleasant though it proved.

  The sample smelled like pickled death. It stank of rot and fire, as of something imperfectly fermented. The fumes were thick in my nostrils, and I bit my tongue fiercely to keep myself from sneezing. Almost as if the contents emitted some noxious, dizzying gas, my vision became light and my concentration waned.