Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)
Cherie Priest
For Karl, even though he’s not in this one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m always terrified when it comes to acknowledgments and thanks, because I feel like I’m virtually guaranteed to leave out someone important—by virtue of my own cluelessness. So, although there are approximately a thousand people I’d like to mention here, I will try to keep it relatively short and sweet.
Therefore, I offer copious and oversized thanks to the usual suspects: my editor, Anne Sowards, who helped bang this thing into shape, and wonder publicist Alexis Nixon, who helped launch Maplecroft so grandly (in preparation for this here follow-up); my agent, Jennifer Jackson—who also serves part-time as my bottle rocket of fiery justice—and likewise to all the other fine folks at the Donald Maass agency, who make my life easier each day; my husband, J. Aric Annear, who hears all about these projects in what must surely be excruciating detail but never pushes me off a cliff or anything; and, of course, to everyone else on the production and marketing teams at Roc. Even though I don’t know all your names. You rock. Yes, you.
Leonard Kincaid, American Institute of Accountants, Certified Member
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA FEBRUARY 9, 1920
I escaped Chapelwood under the cover of daylight, not darkness. The darkness is too close, too friendly with the terrible folk who worship there.
(The darkness would give me away, if I gave it half a chance.)
So I left them an hour after dawn, when the reverend and his coterie lay sleeping in the hall beneath the sanctuary. When last I looked upon them, taking one final glance from the top of the stairs—down into the dim, foul-smelling quarter lit only with old candles that were covered in dust—I saw them tangled together, limb upon limb. I would say that they writhed like a pit of vipers, but that wasn’t the case at all. They were immobile, static. It was a ghastly, damp tableau. Nothing even breathed.
I should have been down there with them; that’s what the reverend would’ve said if he’d seen me. If he’d caught me, he would’ve lured me into that pallid pile of flesh that lives but is not alive. He would have reminded me of the nights I’ve spent in the midst of those arms and legs, tied together like nets, for yes, it is true: I have been there with them, among the men and women lying in a heap in the cellar. I have been a square in that quilt, a knot in that rug of humanity, skin on skin with the boneless, eyeless things that are not arms, and are not legs.
(I dream of it now, even when I’m not asleep.)
But never again. I have regained my senses—or come back to them, having almost fled them altogether.
So what sets me apart from the rest of them, enthralled by the book and the man who wields it? I cannot say. I do not know. I wanted to be with them, to be like them. I wanted to join their ranks, for I believed in their community, in their goals. Or I thought I did.
I am rethinking all the things I thought.
I am fashioning new goals, goals that will serve mankind better than the distant, dark hell that the reverend and his congregation seek to impose upon us all. They taught me too much, you see. They let me examine too many of their secrets too closely, and taste too much of the power they chase with their prayers and their formulas.
When they chose me for an acolyte, they chose poorly.
I take comfort in this, really, I do. It means that they can misjudge. They can fail.
So they can fail again, and indeed they must.
? ? ?
In retrospect, I wish I had done more than leave. I wish I’d found the strength to do them some grievous damage, some righteous recompense for the things they’ve done, and the things they strive to do in the future. Even as I stood there at the top of the stairs, gazing down at that mass of minions, or parishioners, or whatever they might call themselves . . . I was imagining a kerosene lantern and a match. I could fling it into their midst, toss down the lighted match, and lock the door behind myself. I could burn the whole place down around their ears, and them with it.
(And maybe also burn away the boneless limbs, which are not arms, and are not legs.)
But even with all the kerosene and all the matches in the world, would a place so wicked burn? A place like Chapelwood . . . a place that reeks of mildew and rot, and the spongy squish of timbers going soft from the persistent wetness that the place never really shakes—how many matches would it require?
All of them?
? ? ?
I stood at the top of the stairs and I trembled, but I did not attempt any arson.
I did nothing bolder than weep, and I did that silently. I can tell myself I did something brave and strong, when I walked away and left them behind. I can swear that into the mirror until I die, but it isn’t true. I’m a coward; that’s the truth. I was a coward there at Chapelwood, and I am a coward every day I do not descend upon that frightful compound with a militia of righteous men and all the matches in the world, if that’s what it would take to see the place in ashes.
Not that I could muster any such militia.
Even the most righteous of men would be hard-pressed to believe me, and I can only admit that my case against the reverend may well sound like nonsense. But the strangeness of my message makes it no less true, and no less deadly. No less an apocalypse-in-waiting.
In time, perhaps, they will reveal themselves as monsters and the city will rise up to fight them. And the one thing working in my favor is that, yes, there is time. Their mechanizations are slow, and that’s just as well; what horror would the universe reveal if mankind could alter it with a whim and a prayer? No, they need time yet—time, and blood. So there is time for the men of Chapelwood to make a mistake, and I will be watching them. Waiting for them.