Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(108)

Seconds away.

With a flick of my wrist, and that old muscle-memory from the war and from all the days after it, I reloaded on the fly and fired again. I aimed for their heads. If one shot could take them down, that was the shot that would do it. The dead thing beside me, added to Lizzie’s pile, suggested as much.

But a glance down at the thing told me it twitched still, a jerk of the knee, a shift of the elbow. Its head was exploded, and still it struggled to rise.

I put my boot against this one, too. I stomped as hard as I could, catching its skull between the oak slat boards and my heel, and I crushed it down to pulp. Then I raised my gun. The rest of them were coming.

They were at the steps, fumbling up the bottom, grasping toward my feet.

I fired, and fired, and fired, and reloaded from my pocket until there were no more bullets left—and then I rushed inside the hall and slammed the door shut behind myself. I would have locked it, but the lock had ripped away, or blown away; it was gone, and I had nothing to barricade it with except for a nearby plant stand. I pulled it down and used it to brace the door in its frame—poorly, I’ll grant, but better than nothing. I pulled up the carpet runner behind me, rolled it up, shoved it up against the door; I pulled down curtains and threw them into the pile along with their rods; I dragged a small end table into the mix and then a tall-backed chair from the parlor.

Outside, they cried . . . and they beat their hands against the badly shut door, but they did not push it open. Outside, they hovered and complained, as Lizzie promised they would. She knew something I didn’t. Outside, they stayed.





? ? ?


(I was inside, where I’d chosen to make my stand—or been forced to make it, if I were being truthful in this record, which I will leave behind somewhere, for someone, in the event that I go fully mad. Let this remind Fall River that I was not always insane, and that I fought for my home. I fought for my life, my soul, my sanity. And for everyone else’s.

Then again, maybe I’ll destroy everything. This could be my last gift: that the world should never know the lengths we went to, when we stood between Fall River and the ocean . . . armed with little more than an old axe.)





? ? ?


I was forced to come inside. I could not have taken them all.

I went to the cabinet and found the rest of the bullets, scattered on the floor. I gathered them up carefully, quickly. I pocketed every last one, except for the six I thumbed into the chambers. My fingers shook. I dropped two bullets, and collected them again.

From below, far downstairs—in the cellar laboratory where I knew that Lizzie and Emma were not alone—I heard an inhuman, unearthly howl.

I cradled the gun. I leaned against the wall and fought for courage—any courage I might have left. I gathered it like bullets, and I feared that, like the bullets, it would not be enough.





Lizzie Andrew Borden


MAY 7, 1894

I left Seabury to hold the front door as long as he could, not because I thought he could defend us all against the peril outside, but because it might thin the ranks out there. We couldn’t have those things running amok in the neighborhood, making Fall River an even greater hell than it’d already become. Killing them while they were gathered in one spot would be easier, in the long run, then hunting them all down later.

And it might buy me time.

I already knew that the nails were working, though why they worked, I still had no idea—and I still did not care. Tetanus poisoning, magic, some other mechanism . . . it did not matter. The barrier held true. The creatures had not come inside, and that was reassuring. It meant there was a pattern after all, and maybe the pattern was broad enough to include the toxins and the globulins, because why not?

The front door had been opened, burst inward—its lock destroyed. Something had come inside. Not the minions, but their master. He was strong enough to ignore my precautions. He might well be strong enough to withstand the toxins, or bullets, or my axe, or any other weapon at my disposal.

Then what would it take to kill him?

Once inside, I dithered but a moment—trying to figure out what had happened to Emma. We’d left her sitting in the parlor; she couldn’t have gone very far. Did the mad professor abscond with her? Did she manage to move herself to safety?

No. There was no such thing.

Seabury was still shooting on the front porch. The repeated percussions battered my ears, they were so very close, as I skittered from room to room, looking for my sister. I slipped on some bullets that had rolled across the foyer; Seabury must’ve spilled them. I saw the opened drawer, dangling from its hole in the cabinet. So we were all uncoordinated and frightened, and not so alone after all. I had my axe. He had my father’s old gun, and that was good. Let it serve some purpose after all, and after all these years. One last hurrah from the thing, and one more hurrah for the old soldier who fired it into the night.

I hoped it was not his last. Or mine.

A wicked flash of illumination revealed a scene of bloody carnage, bloody handprints. My sister’s, I believed—but she might not be injured. She might be coughing; this might be terrible, but not supernatural. Another stroke of lightning. More blood, in smears and spatters. Well, if all that blood came from her lungs and not some grievous wound, it was still bad enough. I’d never known her to lose so much at once, in so many directions. It was everywhere. The floors, the banisters, the doorjambs.