Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(35)

“The pair of you? Together?” I asked, hoping to bring him back to the tale, away from the speculation.

“That’s right, both of us. We opened the door and . . . and . . . and . . .” His eyes grew frantic, and his hands fluttered. I was afraid I was about to lose his attention—and he was on the cusp of losing his sanity.

I said to the two officers seated beside him, “Gentlemen, could you possibly give us a moment alone? I’m afraid the audience is a bit much for him. Please, if you could be so kind?”

They exchanged glances, and I knew they were considering their jobs, and the correct procedures in a case like this. But I had a very firm suspicion that there was no such thing as a “case like this,” and I was furthermore confident that Ebenezer would speak more openly to me, and me alone.

“He’s not been charged with a crime, has he?”

“No,” one of them confirmed. “Not yet, and maybe not at all. But that ain’t up to us.”

But leaving us alone . . . that was an act within their authority, or so they concluded. They were kind enough to see themselves out, and I rose to quietly shut the door behind them. “They’ll stay out there,” I said to Ebenezer, as I joined him again at the table. “Watching the door, I’m sure—but if you’re quiet enough, they’ll never hear you speak.”

He agreed, and leaned forward. His large, chapped hands were still pressed to the table between us. In the cracks of his knuckles, blood was drying to the color of rust.

Quickly, he spit out the rest: “We went to the door together, and I told her we should wait, we should call for you, or for the police, because dear God in Heaven, we was in over our heads, you see?”

“Yes, I see.”

“But my wife, she said it was nonsense, and he was only a boy, and she pushed me aside. She was crying, so I think she was foolin’ herself, and she knew it good and well, but what could I do? What could I say? And if I sent for help, how could I explain there’s some . . . some machine holed up in the bedroom with the boy?”

He caught his breath, wiped his brow with the other sleeve. The cleaner one.

“So we didn’t do none of them things, and she opened the door . . . and then there was this stench, you hear? Something so awful, like nothing I’d ever smelled—or I’d never smelled something half so strong.” His attention snapped, and he was clear-eyed for a moment. “And I’ll have ye to know that I was one of the men who helped carve up that dead whale last summer, the one what beached up on the rocks. It’d been cooking in the sun, rotting in the water, and the smell was so bad, I thought I’d die—but I didn’t.” Then he said, “The smell in Matty’s room, it was worse than that.”

He paused, and for a moment he stared into space, at some indistinct spot just behind me. Then he found my eyes again, and corrected himself slightly. “When we opened that door, I thought of that whale’s innards, when Abe Scanton’s shovel pierced its stomach and everything the whale’d eaten for a week came splashing out, and it smelled like rot and belly acid, and Abe fainted dead away on the spot. Yeah,” he said with a nod. “The smell wasn’t quite the same, but it wasn’t quite different, neither.”

“Very good,” I said, filing this away with no small measure of distaste. But you couldn’t fault the man for his lack of precision, or his sense of understatement. “You’ve established the smell—now can you tell me what you saw?”

“I saw . . . ,” he started, and then he tried again, closing his eyes as if trying to remember the scene better—or maybe to block it out. “Water,” he breathed. “On the walls, on the windows. Pouring off the edge of the bed, pouring down the dresser drawers, and along the floor in little streams, little lines. Draining away between the floorboards. And I saw Matty, but he weren’t . . . he wasn’t . . .”

Quieter now, his voice dropped low, to a horrified whisper. “He was swimming. Not in the water, but the air, above his bed. Treading water in the middle of the room, his eyes rolled back in his head, nothing showing but the whites, and they weren’t very white anymore. They were blue and brown. Marbled, like a dirty old egg. And his mouth . . .” Ebenezer licked at his lower lip, and swallowed again. “It moved like he was talking, but he wasn’t . . . he was making that noise, that grinding underwater noise. Like a machine with wheels and chains, and soaked-wet wood, pulling against some kind of weight. Dredging something up. Hauling something out of the ocean.”

That last word hung in the air between us.

It was my turn to swallow hard, and to lick my lips, and now to lean back—and wrap my own arms around myself. “So Matthew did make the sound you heard?”

“Yes. No. He was . . . it looked like he was making it. But it wasn’t a sound a boy could make. No living thing, Doctor. No living thing makes a sound like that.” He might’ve argued further, but then he waved his hand, changing his subject or finding it again, as the case may be. “Then Felicity, she screamed—and she ran to Matty, pulled on his leg, trying to draw him back down to the ground. But whatever held him in the air did a mighty good job of it, and he didn’t budge, not at all. He just hung there, his arms moving around like he was keeping himself afloat, swimming in the air like it was the ocean, his hair all swaying back and forth like seaweed.”