Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(100)

I looked again to the cabinet, and the drawer where waited the gun.

I could reach it. I could use what willpower and effort I had left in my reserves to seize it and brandish it, probably before the man outside (it wasn’t a man, but you understand my meaning) could reach the door, open it, and accost me in whatever gruesome fashion he undoubtedly had planned.





? ? ?


   I had seen the news articles. I had spoken to Seabury when he was flush with brandy, and sharing more than he intended about what was coming across the state, barreling down upon us like a train, only so much worse.





? ? ?


I looked at the man (who wasn’t a man) and I waited for the lightning to flare just right, at the precise angle needed to see him more fully.

He did not move, and that flare did not come.

So it must have been by design—surely no accident—that the wonder-filled sky roared and complained, and illuminated the whole world except for the one man I most wished to see. (I know, I know. Not a man. But shaped like one.)

And if the weather itself worked against me . . . if he was the one who compelled the lightning (not lightning, but shaped like it) . . . what good would a single revolver be against that kind of might?

I was afraid to look away from the shadow on the lawn. If I looked away, he might vanish—only to reappear nearer. If I looked away, he could do anything. Be anything. Become anything. But not while I watched. So long as I fixed him with my gaze, he would not move; I felt it like a superstition. It was a fiction I invented on the spot, and when he moved . . . it wasn’t a grand motion, just an adjustment of his hand upon the head of the cane, but it shocked me.

It positively undid me.

It shouldn’t have. I know exactly how useless superstition is.

I whipped my eyes over to the cabinet again, and dismissed the gun as being too much trouble. What good is a gun against something like him?

(It. This was no longer a him.)

“Zollicoffer.” I said his name, because the oldest stories of all make it clear that names have power. God named Adam, and Adam named the animals. This is how we know who has power over whom. Witches, warlocks, and servants of gods keep their names to themselves, lest they be used in magic against them.

Well, I didn’t give him his name, but I knew it. (Its name.)

“Zollicoffer,” I said again. “Come and get me, if that’s what you’re here for.”

He would come anyway, whether invited or not. I knew it as well as he did, but I’d made the challenge, and now the terms were mine. I would not die on any other.

I turned to the end of the divan, and shuffled down its length at a quicker pace than before. This threat was no theory, no potential hazard. Now this was a monster, and it was here. (He was here.) My chest ached, and it might have only been some morbid fancy on my part, but I swear I felt the blood sloshing back and forth in my lungs. Let it slosh, I thought. Just let me reach the cellar.

I’d never attempted the cellar stairs before.

It’d been too dangerous, too ludicrous to attempt it, which often made me sad and a bit jealous. Between the two of us, Lizzie was not the scientist; the vials, burners, and tubes were not her passion or pastime. I should have been the one to take the notes and watch the results. It should have been me, measuring carefully and plotting experiments. I would not have experimented with legend and lore. I would have put to bed her insistence on myth and mystery, and the nuggets of truth therein. She wasted her time looking for them. She crawled too far up her own hypothesis, and could not be lured back to reality. She could not be lured up the stairs, or convinced to bring me down them.

Oh, she claimed that this was for the best, and besides, the experiments she performed were gruesome. So she said.

Her idea of gruesome and mine have never matched up very well. Zollicoffer outside could’ve told her that, and maybe—had the sample I sent him been a benign, smelly thing—he would’ve had the chance.

Not now. We were all out of chances.

But down in the cellar there were toxins and globulins, every bit as risky as any magic potion. Untried, untested, unstudied—except on ordinary men and women, ordinary animals through the university. So it showed some progress against tetanus. Fine. So these creatures seem to be infected with some weird strain of tetanus. All right. The connection was tenuous . . . more tenuous than I’d wanted to let Lizzie know, not while she still held out some hope for Nance. But we were past that now, and I had nothing else at my disposal with which to fight—nothing else with even the vague peddler’s promise of a weapon.

So when there is nothing left but magic, we start learning spells—and I’d rather take a chance on Seabury’s scientific spells than on Lizzie’s ancient songs.

My sister’s judgment could not be trusted. Nance was proof of that. Seabury’s behavior could not be trusted. His betrayal of my secret made that clear; but I might yet trust his training and his instincts. If not that, then perhaps I could trust his friend in Rhode Island. Perhaps I could trust a poison concocted by bright men in white coats, in clean, cold laboratories where things too small to see are grown and harvested.

These were the straws I grasped, one by one, all in a row. I followed them like bread crumbs.

Around the divan, to the stair rail again; along the wall, where I clung to the kitchen’s entryway; my breathing was wretched and forced; I fell to my hands and knees, and while I was down there I crawled because there was nothing I could use to pull myself up. I reached the cellar door and I turned the knob, and at that very moment I heard a knocking at the front door.