Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(38)

It was definitely off. And the office was definitely gloomy, so gloomy that I could hardly see Her, sitting in the jar, cradled there, but deserving better.

She glimmered, and what little light remained in the room winked against the glass, showing off Her sinuous, swimming shape, twisting in the jar, a very slow whirlpool, or a carousel, or the ethereal winding of a cotton candy machine. She pivoted to show me Her whole self. She unfurled, and I was transfixed.

I couldn’t hear the men outside the door anymore.

I don’t know who Greer was talking to. Hanson, maybe, or Applegate. If they were still present, they’d gone silent. If they were standing on the other side of the door, they said nothing. I said nothing. I watched Physalia zollicoffris.

I looked away.

I opened the door with my left hand. My right hand was holding something, and I could feel it, hard and cold, but I did not look down to see what it was. I did not care. I knew what to do, and I knew where to go.

Into the hall I stepped. I walked. I proceeded.

Down the hall, which was empty. No one whispered, and no chancellor hung about, spreading lies and gossip. No students walked past, shirking their responsibilities in favor of cigarettes behind the boiler room.

(This hallway was the quickest shortcut. They came and went like the tide, always leaving a trail of tobacco vapors in their wake. Like they accused me. Of leaving. What was it? The odor of the specimen. In my wake.)

Like my office the corridor was darkened, though it was midday, I was relatively confident. Midday, and not an ounce of sun to shine through at the ends of the hall, where a trio of great windows reached from almost-floor to almost-ceiling. They looked like the window in my office—no, in my laboratory, where the students come and go—covered in water, that drained down the glass in cascades. The whole building was submerged, as it ought to be.

To make Her more comfortable.

She was behind me, on the table, in the jar. I wished for Her but there was nothing to be done, not now, not yet. Work to do first. Then devotion.

There was no one in the hall with me, and I walked it forever.

My hand snatched out, the one holding the blade. It was a blade, not a scalpel, something larger. Smaller than a machete, larger than a pocketknife. Large enough, at any rate. I lashed and struck like a snake, at nothing, at no one. But there was blood on my hand when I looked down, and it wasn’t mine. None of this was mine. But I was alone.

Somehow, this didn’t confuse me. Somehow, She urged me on, and said that the answers would come, and She always speaks the truth, and never lies to me. It isn’t Her way.

I proceeded to Greer’s office because he was there. (I knew he was there. She told me he would be.) I did not knock on the door because I do not knock on doors, not anymore. I certainly do not ask permission of worms like that man with his name upon the brass plate, his letters etched into the metal, scratched there by some printer’s claw.

I opened the door and the knob was chilly in my hand, so chilly that my skin stuck to it—the blood or the water on my skin, it froze, and I pulled myself free with a twist, after the twist of the knob. I did not like the metal. Wasn’t sure what it was. Looked down, and saw it was the old-fashioned iron sort, a lever. Not a knob. I don’t understand, because I thought I twisted it.

But it was cold, very cold. And it was lying on the floor where I broke it off and dropped it, and the skin on my hand was torn, but it mended itself before my eyes.





? ? ?


Dr. Greer shouted at me. Some querulous complaint.

“Zollicoffer, what’s happened? What have you done?”

Some series of meaningless question marks, cast at me like a spell. I understood his words again, and I understood that he was upset. He damned well ought to be upset. He’d offended Her with his treatment of me. He’d offended us both, Her in the glass throne I would carry with me always. Me in the flesh and blood, covered in flesh and blood, holding a blade, the kind scientists use to saw through bone. It came from the biology lab.

Did it? I couldn’t recall having seen one like it there before. A fine steel thing, gleaming except where the gore had smudged off the shine. Its edges ragged and grasping, its teeth chewing on bits of skin and gristle that had snagged upon them.

I held it by the wooden handle. I held it with the blade point down, the way She told me. I held his neck. He stopped yelling at me, and that was a terrible relief. I couldn’t stand the sound of his voice anymore. I couldn’t bear the volume of it, the weight and the frequency of it, not until it faded into gurgles and bubbles, and his desk was awash with crimson.

The crimson was not as pretty as the water pouring down the windows outside.

She warned me not to watch the water too long. She warned me to move on to the next office, while there was time. Before anyone intervened.

I was unstoppable, but I mustn’t stop.

Greer’s office door banged open, and Dr. Madison stood there, his mouth hanging open like a wound. He began to shout, and his shouting was even worse than Greer’s, which was truly saying something. His shouting took longer to stop. I had to drag him inside. He kept saying “No,” as if he firmly believed this couldn’t happen, and therefore it must not be happening.

But I was unstoppable, and I did not stop.

I left them lying together, their blood pooling into puddles, into deep enough puddles to drown in. Into ponds. Into lakes. And She told me not to watch it, that I had to keep going. I must not stop.