Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(106)

But I had no time to confront it, not then and there, when the house loomed up out of the darkness before us.

I say “loomed” as if it were a monster, and it wasn’t; but the jagged, pretty, gingerbready shape loomed despite itself. A large, lovely place, broad and welcoming. A beautiful house, shrouded in darkness . . . and then, in flashes of light that wasn’t lightning—illuminated and awful. The brilliant flickers showed the whole thing in stark shadow, black against white, and then the reverse . . . so quickly that the impression was burned on my retinas, making the effect all the stranger, every time I blinked.

“Doctor!” The word was strong and sharp, fired like a bullet.

Immediately, I knew why.

I announced, “I see them!” For I saw them, and it was enough to stop my hammering heart.

Crawling around the house like spiders, their spindly white hands clutching at the windowsills, the stairs, the bricks, the shrubs. Tramping on the roses, marching through the bushes. I saw half a dozen at a hasty count, but there must have been more around the rear of the house, or the sides we could not see. They were battering the place, but not entering it . . . as if some strange boundary or supernatural order prevented them.





? ? ?


One by one they looked away from the house, and they stared at us with hateful, hungry eyes that were pale and white. Fish eyes. Watery eyes. Eyes with hate, but not intelligence—not the clever, conniving eyes of a cephalopod, or the serious squint of a seal. These eyes were cold and flat like a shark’s, but that is unfair. A shark’s eyes were only black and hungry. They were not shrouded, and full of malice.

One by one the creatures peeled themselves away from the mansion, their attention drawn to us. Moths, and we were the flame. All but two, who remained at the front door on all fours, padding back and forth, their backs arched and their fingers pointed, they slathered and stalked.

The front door was open. It took me a few seconds to notice. It was open, but still they paced before it, unable or unwilling to enter.

I was confident that I had closed and locked the door behind me. It was the last sane, deliberate act I performed before leaving the house, in fierce pursuit of the younger Borden sister—leaving the elder one behind. Therefore, something or someone had opened it. Something or someone had gone inside, for surely Emma lacked the strength or the stupidity to leave it ajar.

“Lizzie,” I breathed, drawing up to a halt.

She slowed to a sure-footed walk but did not stop. She adjusted her axe, twisting it back and forth between her hands. She said, “Stay with me.”

Stay with her? I supposed there wasn’t much choice.

She was armed and I was not—though I spent a frantic moment wondering if I shouldn’t take the axe away from her and wield it myself. But no, that would not do, if for no other reason than that I probably couldn’t. She might not leave me my hands. Or my life.

She was as single-minded as the creatures that stalked her porch.

I stayed close behind her as commanded, but I remained far enough back that she was unlikely to strike me—which was good, because the first creature reached her and she whipped the axe around, catching it in the head. Splitting it like a melon. Not even looking at it, not even checking to see if it was down and would stay that way . . . she moved onward, keeping her eyes on the front door.

“They’ll follow us inside . . . ?” I meant to suggest, and ended up asking, with a pitiful question mark affixed to the end.

“They won’t.”

She knew something that I didn’t. And not for the first time, either.

We were drawing nearer and nearer to the house. More and more of the things were crawling into the yard, drawn by us. Having seen the one thing, the one time, all those nights ago when I first came to understand the mystery of this place . . . that was bad enough. This was a nightmare in motion, and God help me, we were all of us awake.

“Have you ever seen this many?” I asked her.

“No.”

“They come from the water, don’t they?” I was jogging again to keep up with her, and my breathing was raspy, not quite in her ear.

“I think so.”

“That’s why . . . that’s why the toxin . . . the tetanus . . . your axe,” I tried to tell her, but I could no longer talk and run at the same time. I had not enough strength to do both.





? ? ?


This is what I meant to tell her: the tetani bacteria cannot survive in the water—it needs open air to thrive. These creatures that she fells with her axe like so many trees . . . they never encounter the infection in their native environment, only on the land, here, where it lives so abundantly in the soil and in the flesh of our land-dwelling creatures, and heaven knows where else (or maybe heaven doesn’t). They are vulnerable here. They are vulnerable to her axe. To us. They are not indomitable. (But neither are we.)





? ? ?


“The gun,” she said. We had almost reached the porch. “Better than nothing.”

“The cabinet?” I whispered harshly. It was the only voice I had left.

“Just inside. The near wall of the parlor,” she gasped back. “I’ll take care of these things.”

She swung hard to the right and caught one of the brutes through the neck—fully beheading it, so great was her momentum. She reached the stairs and with one fast sweep she stunned the first sentinel at the door, and grievously wounded the other. Blood that looked like bile splattered across the paneling and across her dress, and the glittering shards of crystalline teeth sparkled across her nightdress. She swung again, and struck the creature again, pushing it aside.