Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(103)

I’d forgotten entirely. Lizzie and her nails, in the middle of the night. Every doorway, every windowsill.

“It is an old rule. I do not know how much truth it holds, or why. But I will confess, I can . . . feel them. The sharp spikes of iron, driven through the wood . . . I can feel them through my shoes. It is unpleasant, but by no means insurmountable. For me,” the man-shaped thing added quickly. “Though the smaller things that walk with me . . . they’ve elected to remain outside.”

One by one, the ideas lined up neatly in my head. The nails, the rust. The tetanus.

There was a pattern after all. Seabury was right, in some fashion or another. And so was Lizzie.

I wondered where he was. I wondered if he’d caught up to my sister, or if he’d been captured by the smaller things Zollicoffer spoke of . . . torn apart by the needle-mouthed monsters that stalked Maplecroft in the wee hours, when we’d rather sleep than wage war.

Then I wondered about my sister.

The tip of the cane passed over the nails, each one pounded into the floor in a haphazard line. Then the left foot, and the right. `

“You see? It’s only a peculiar sensation, that’s all.”

It descended the stairs with great deliberation, moving from the brightness upstairs to the cold, muted light here below. It did so with grace, and with the countenance of a curious man who is delighted by all the wonder he surveys.

It was of average height and a slender build, with a face that seemed very lean and sharp. That face cast strange shadows when it moved, those cheekbones, that high forehead, the cut of those rather full lips and devilishly arched brow. If I’d seen him on the street and mistaken him for a man, I would not have said he was handsome . . . not at first. But I would have looked at him twice, and on a second look, I might have revised my estimation.

I should say instead that it was compelling.

It wore a suit that had been finely tailored, perhaps for someone else. An expensive suit, and worn with rigid confidence . . . but I believe it was likely stolen. All of it, black and gray. From the shiny black shoes with the pointed toes, to the gray felt hat with the sweeping curves and lofty height.

It looked so very human, until it smiled at me.

I was cornered, pressed up against the wall, holding the vial of toxin between my fingers, behind my folded-up knees so he couldn’t see what I was doing as I worried at the wax, picking at it without looking at it. I met his eyes instead. They were cold, not like a serpent’s but like a shark’s. Dead and hungry.

Slowly, deliberately, with profound and devilish malice, the thing walked toward me. It stopped less than ten feet away, and planted its cane down hard. Right atop the cooker, whose cabinet door I’d closed.





? ? ?


(I wondered if I should’ve left it open after all. If I could have found some way to push the creature inside, in case that might’ve killed it. Surely nothing could survive a bath in the cooker, could it? Not even this bony shark of a thing? Regardless, it was too late. I’d made my decision, and I would have to live with it. Or die by it, as the case may be.)





? ? ?


In that low, odd, smoother-than-oil voice, he said, “Doctor Jackson?”

I was startled by how unstartled it appeared. “Doctor Zollicoffer?” I replied in a whisper, not because I was afraid of him (although I was), but because my strength was almost gone—and a whisper was the most I could manage. A whisper, and a frantic wheedling with my thumbnail, struggling to remove the stopper on my vial of toxin.

“I was.” It confessed more than I’d asked it. “Now we are different, and we have you to thank.”

“We . . . ?”

It came closer and crouched down, knees cracking as it bent nearer to my eye level. It left one hand atop the cane and regarded me with curiosity. “We,” it confirmed. “We are not what you expected. But then, you are not what we expected, either.”

“I am a woman,” I breathed.

“You are weak,” it countered, as if I’d missed the point entirely. “But we can help.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Are you sure?” it asked, cocking its head and giving me an odious smile.

“I want you to leave.”

“Yet you scarcely have the breath to say so. I was weak once, too.”

“We aren’t the same, you and I,” I assured it.

It agreed. “No, not the same. But there is some sameness about us. We both see things more clearly than the rest. That’s why you sent me the jar, isn’t it?”

“I sent it because . . .” White sparks fizzled before my eyes, and I struggled to compose myself. I realized that I’d stopped picking at the wax cork, and I began again—adjusting myself to sit up straighter, hoping to mask the tiny motions of my subterfuge. “I thought you would find it . . . interesting.”

It nodded vigorously. Earnestly. And for a moment I glimpsed, or I thought I glimpsed, some spark of the humanity he once had possessed—the eagerness for knowledge, for novelty. A fondness for discovery.

“Life-changing, really. And not just mine. Your small act of kindness will change the world.” It turned that long, sharp nose to the right and its eyes closed halfway. It smiled again, lips pressed together. “Do you hear that?”