Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(55)
Then I picked it up.
I examined it, squeezing it to reassure myself that all was well. But all was not well. Emma was still ringing. Her wrists must’ve been about to fall off. It must’ve been exhausting, the ringing all this time. But still I ignored it, not quite alert enough to attend to more than one thing at a time. The key in my fist. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t the cellar key, but some clever replacement, originally fitting the lock to God knew what. God knew where she’d found it.
God knew what she’d done.
I went for my wardrobe—almost fell into it, if the truth be known. I bruised myself against it as I wrestled the door open and pulled out my axe, which I did not leave out in the open when Nance was around, not anymore. I’d started hiding it, like it was some secret. Like she hadn’t seen it already. She liked it a little too much, that was all. It made me feel strange.
“Emma!” I shouted, having heard all I could stand of the bell. “Emma, I’m up! I’m coming!”
I ran down the hall, my knees still feeling like they weren’t quite mine, and weren’t quite connected to my body. It was a jerky stumble at best, but I stayed upright and dashed to Emma’s room, where I looked in and saw at a glance that she was alive, and unharmed, and that Nance wasn’t with her.
“Nance . . . ,” she gasped.
“I’ll get her,” I swore, half out of breath already.
I didn’t stay to hear her reply. I made for the stairs, where I tripped over my own toes and went face-first into the banister—and I caught myself, dragged myself to a stop before I’d gone down too terribly far, and shook the ringing out of my ears. It wasn’t Emma’s bell anymore. It was just the incessant hum of my head trying to force the rest of me more fully awake, because this was bad. Worse than bad. Worse than terrible, and worse than whatever is worse than that. I felt it in my bones, and my bones were still shaking—not yet ready to hold me up. My legs ached, and I wondered quite seriously if I hadn’t fractured something.
(I turned out to be right, but it wasn’t my leg after all; it was my nose when it slammed against the edge of a step, or one of the banister rods. I have no idea which. I didn’t see the blood until later.)
I didn’t know what Nance would do if she found the cellar. Would she see the equipment and investigate it? Destroy it? Demolish my research at the behest of whatever drew her down there? What if she found the cupboard in the floor?
What would that mean? What would it do?
I made it to the bottom of the stairs by the skin of my teeth, collected myself, and retrieved the axe. (It had fallen out of my grasp and toppled the rest of the way down without me.) I scrambled into the kitchen, and there, yes—the cellar door. Flung open. Swinging slowly on its hinge, and a soft rushing noise like wind in a cave escaping past it, up into the house.
Hoarsely I screamed Nance’s name, and took a better grip on the axe, praying that I wouldn’t need it. I didn’t know if I could kill her, if it came to that. I didn’t know what I’d do when I found her, or what she would’ve done to herself.
What was calling her?
It must’ve been the stones, yes. Sealed in their box, and sometimes that wasn’t enough to keep even me from hearing them, and becoming enraptured. I’d learned the price of listening to them, and I knew how much I had to lose. Nance didn’t. Nance didn’t deserve to be in the middle of this.
The lights were on, down there. The glow seeped up from between the steps, which were only wood slat things—I’d never installed anything sturdier, feeling that it wasn’t worth the trouble. The glow was yellow, not the vivid white of the gas lamps, and I told myself that it didn’t mean anything. I mumbled as I descended, insisting that it could’ve been worse—it could’ve been green.
“Nance?” I called again, and my head still spun, for I was still half stuck in the dreams from which I’d been so rudely dragged. I forced myself to work against the drugs, planting my feet one in front of the other, going a tad more slowly, clutching the handrail as I went because I wasn’t sure I could get back up again, should I take another spill. My body already ached all over from the first one.
I heard her voice.
She murmured something, and I couldn’t hear it. One word, or one syllable anyway. It could’ve been anything, but it meant she was alive and that she was still capable of responding to me. My panic wasn’t entirely soothed, but such was my joy at hearing her that I took the last steps two at a time and almost fell again, but caught myself—using the axe as a cane to steady my balance upon my arrival.
“Nance, where are you? What have you done?”
My eyes answered both questions.
She’d found the cupboard in the floor. The stones themselves had told her where they were, and how to find them, and what they wanted.
She’d retrieved the box they were kept in, and now they were scattered around the ground, except for the one set in a necklace. It’d been Mrs. Borden’s. It was the necklace I’d taken, after she was dead. Now Nance wore it, and the sight filled me with misery.
She was lying beside the hole in the floor, cupboard opened and box exposed, emptied. Its contents scattered. Her breathing was shallow, too fast, not normal at all. Her eyes were glazed over, and she stared at the ceiling—where there was nothing to see.