Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(112)

Still holding on to his broken head, he pushed back with his shoulder, absorbing some of my momentum—but I shoved him again, with all my weight. Together we fell over the upended table—him backward, me atop him—and he tried to catch himself. He extended his free hand, and landed on it. Not half an inch beside the cooker.

He teetered. The edge so close he must’ve been able to smell the lye and the heat.

He leaned, and tried to roll away.

He released his grip on his head wound, and blood gushed forth . . . or if not blood, then something thicker than that. Whatever weird oil went through his veins, it splattered the room, the table, the floor, and the cooker.

Hastily he scrambled, the long pianist fingers clawing at the floor. The nails breaking, splitting. The fingers bleeding, dragging themselves up and down against the table, which lay on its side and blocked his escape. He scuttled on the floor, half-blinded by the fluids that drained from his head.

He was trapped between the table and the cooker. Between me, and the precious few weapons at my disposal. (The devil and the deep blue sea.)

I braced myself behind the table, planting my shoulder and my knee against it. (My laboratory. My table. My sword, my shield.) I threw all my weight against it, and it scooted—not even a foot. Not even another foot, when I pushed it again.

But it was enough.

I forced Zollicoffer back against the cooker’s precipice, and past it, and over the edge.

Hip-first he splashed down, and the lye solution cascaded—eroding and consuming, sizzling against his skin. It splashed and frothed wildly as he wrestled to escape, but I was behind the table, pushing it atop him, hounding him, hiding from the worst of the deadly acid spray.

Even as he bathed in the cooker, he was not finished yet. With a burst of strength, he seized the table and broke it—more by accident than design, I think. He was flailing; these were his death throes.

(But they were formidable, violent throes, and I knew all too well that I might not survive them.)

Lye sloshed onto the floor, and spattered the room. Without the table’s protective barrier, I got spattered, too, though I scarcely felt it at first.

His hand seized my ankle, and he nearly pulled me into the cooker alongside him. But his energy waned. He only pulled me down, only to the edge, with those bony hands that had lost most of their skin—and were reduced to knuckles and tendons and twiggy phalanges exposed to the air.

He only brought me within kicking range.

I shoved my foot against his face and tried not to see how that face was melting, and how my foot scraped off a rag of skin from his forehead.

He released me. He leaned back, his mouth open to scream. His tongue withered, and writhed.

I dove for the cupboard door, refusing to look back—refusing to watch what I was doing—and I lifted it up, so I could close it down on top of him.

Or I tried to close it.

One of his arms and one leg refused to be contained, though the rest of his body thrashed in the cooker’s belly; still, even as it ate him alive, he sought to drown me, too, in the depths of the machine, if not in the ocean, where he would take Emma. Where somehow he’d taken Nance.

Where we all came from. Where we all were going.

I climbed atop the cupboard door and held it upon him, using what little leverage I had to offer; and when Seabury finally appeared at the top of the steps, crying my name and Emma’s . . . I screamed for him to join me.





? ? ?


(He did not attempt to rescue the madman, thank God. He did not try to feed me to the cooker. He was not mad after all. Not that mad, anyway. Not that kind of mad, at least. Not so mad that he did not know himself, and who his friends were.)





? ? ?


Together the good doctor and I held him down, and in time, there was not enough left of Zollicoffer to move those stray appendages.

He stopped fighting.

The only thrashing came from the chemicals, given so much work to do. The only protests came from the floorboards, all of them near the cooker ruined by the acids. The only burns and stains left were on my arms, and my knees where I’d knelt in the puddles.

We opened the lid, just enough to shove the rest of him inside, and the straggling scraps of his corpse disappeared, sank, and began their dissolution into liquid.

Seabury and I laid ourselves down on the cupboard door, holding it down with our bodies, not believing it was enough. Not until we stopped panting and caught our breath, and realized that there was no more thunder. There were no more cries from beneath the ocean, crashing over the land, rumbling across the sky. The house was dark. The basement was darker still, or it would’ve been, except for the pitiful sizzle of one lone gas lamp that struggled against the shadows.





? ? ?


Seabury carried Emma upstairs and tended to her while I bathed, discovering new injuries, new burns, with every swipe of the washcloth.

The water made me scream, and I chewed through my bottom lip trying to contain myself, to hold in all the pain. My blood tasted like pocket change. The burns and welts blistered, and seared, and stung like brimstone on my forearms and ankles.

My skin rose, and puckered.

I soaked myself in the tub where Nance had drowned but did not die, and I did not think of her floating hair and her waterlogged skin. I did not remember the touch of her lips on mine, her hands on mine, her body on mine. I held the soap and I held the rag, and I washed and washed and washed until my fingers were prunes and the water had gone cold.