Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(63)

“Is it dead?”

She sounded exhausted when she replied, “I have no idea.”

Together we hauled the thing to the cellar doors, a little farther around the back side of Maplecroft. She mostly used the axe to drag it along, and I kicked at it with my boots when pieces appeared on the verge of falling off.

When the doors were unlocked, Lizzie asked me to wait with the thing, and said that she had an idea. So I stayed there alone in silence with the festering mess, and none of this might have ever happened, or so I could almost convince myself. That’s how quiet the whole damn world had become.

Had no one heard us?

Had no one noticed that a life-or-death battle with an unnatural monster took place, right behind a grand old house where the Borden sisters lived? No? I find that incredible, and I’m not sure that I believe it at all. Though if anyone overheard, no one came to help. And no one brought a light, so I’m reasonably confident that no one saw anything. I was standing right there, part of the action myself, and I could barely see it.

Lizzie returned shortly, bearing an old sheet. We scooped the creature’s remains into the sheet and rolled it up, which did make it easier to maneuver the sodden mass down the cellar steps.

I insisted on carrying it. It wasn’t very heavy, a fact which surprised me; and my companion was so tired and injured that it spoke to her credit that she hadn’t yet passed out from the pain and exhaustion.

“Here,” she said, gesturing at a spot on the floor. “I’ll show you what to do now.”

She did not so much kneel as fall to all fours beside an open trapdoor embedded in the floor. Inside I saw a metal trunk about the size of a shoebox, and when I looked at the box, I thought I heard a strange humming noise. It was not entirely unpleasant, but it was entirely distracting.

She closed the trapdoor and sat on it, then turned to another place on the floor and manipulated a cunningly concealed latch. Another portion of the floor lifted away, and I wondered at the honeycombing she must’ve accomplished beneath this house, and what else might lie under our feet.

“I call this ‘the cooker,’” she said simply.

The cooker was an industrial appliance, built into the floor. Its contents burbled and bubbled, and steam valves and gauges covered a panel on the top. “What’s . . . where did you get such a thing?”

“They’re more common than you think. Mostly you find them on farms, or in slaughterhouses.”

“For disposing of large carcasses?”

“Very good. Yes, that’s what it’s for. Now here—” She pointed at the rolled-up thing in the sheet and waved me closer. “Put it inside. Within a few hours, there’ll be nothing left but liquid, which drains out underneath the backyard. Please, help me lower it. It mustn’t splash; the contents of the cooker are highly corrosive.”

“They must be, indeed,” I agreed as I did what she asked. Sheet and all, I placed it within and resisted the urge to stir it up like a repulsive stew.

She shut the lid, set some dials, and a low, murmuring clank announced the steam was flowing and the cooker was doing its job.

Just as she went to close the cabinet door, I thought to exclaim, “Oh! But I would’ve liked to examine it, before we destroyed it. I’m in shock, I suppose. I should’ve said something sooner.”

“There wasn’t much left of it to examine, even by the time we got it to the stairs. Their soft tissue disintegrates very quickly, beginning almost as soon as they’ve stopped moving. The flesh melts down to gelatin, and the bones crumble, until they feel like pebbles in your hands. Still, I am happier to see them boiled down to nothing. At any rate,” she added wryly, “I doubt you’ll be forced to take my word for it. The odds are perilously high that you’ll meet another, if you continue to keep company here.”

“This isn’t the first?”

“No. This is the seventh, or eighth. I can’t recall right now. It’s been . . . such a day. Such a night, as the case may be.”

“Your stepmother, and your father. Is this what they were becoming?”

Softly she said, “I wish I knew for certain, but I have never—not once, in these last few years—ever doubted the course of action I took that night. They were becoming something else . . . and it wasn’t human.”

“Is that your confession?”

“Of something, yes. This has become my life’s work, Doctor Seabury—accidentally, unfortunately, but what else can I do? Surrender to what comes, and let the whole world burn?”

“Or drown,” I said, and I’m not sure why. It was a silly sentiment that sprang to mind, and I aired it.

She took it amicably enough. “Or drown, yes. These things, they have some connection with the ocean—that much is clear. The sea glass, the finned fingers and webbed toes . . .”

“Do they have such things? I didn’t see. There wasn’t time or light enough; thus I wished we’d taken a moment, before tossing it into the bath.”

“I’ll give you my notes, and you are welcome to every scrap of knowledge I’ve collected thus far. I’m afraid it isn’t much.”

“It must be more than I’ve accumulated,” I admitted. “I’ve only been aware of the affliction for these last few weeks, and I haven’t done a very good job of understanding it. I suspect I’ve failed in ways I’ve not yet imagined.”