Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(70)

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I would be together with you and we will talk together, doctor E A Jackson I recall thus your packages came signed that way and I always welcomed them I especially welcomed the last one and then I heard from you no more. it is possible I know it is possible that you have become like me like I have become, not one but many. not self but legion in accordance with the Bible which is not a good book not a very good book not a book at all just a stack of paper compared to the sample Doctor jackson I need to speak with you I will





DEPART, ALL ANIMALS WITHOUT BONES



Owen Seabury, M.D.


APRIL 28, 1894

I sat aghast, the note of a madman painstakingly scrawled before me. For what else could this fellow be, if not raving? If not utterly divorced from his senses? I stared at it in silence, the letters parading before my eyes . . . saying so much and so little all at once. Declaring and warning, threatening and announcing. But what? Beyond a general desire to meet E. A. Jackson? And furthermore, how had Inspector Wolf come to have it in his possession?

Wolf prodded me. “Well?”

“Well?” I replied helplessly. “It’s lunacy—that much is clear. Though the handwriting seems steady enough . . .”

“A copy,” he reminded me.

“Oh yes, that’s right. The words themselves, that’s the real kicker. Where did you find this, again?” It was worth asking, though I knew he’d be evasive.

“At a scene . . . ,” he said vaguely, confirming my suspicion. He still wasn’t interested in telling me more about who he worked for, or what they wanted, or why. But the police accepted his authority, didn’t they? He obviously had some credentials, someplace, that proved his status.

I lifted my eyebrow. “What kind of scene?”

“A scene not entirely unlike that of the Hamiltons. The water damage, left over from some weird interior flood that damaged nothing else. The blood, the convoluted evidence and terrible smell. At first we even had a witness: a young woman who raved like Ebenezer, or maybe worse than that. I can’t say with certainty, having met the man after the fact.”

“But you spoke to this woman?”

“Only briefly. It’d be more accurate to say that she spoke to me. And I have to tell you”—he leaned forward, finger tapping on the paper that now lay between us—“she spoke like this. Her words, they flowed together this way, repeating, ebbing and surging.”

“Do you think she wrote the note?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No. I’m quite confident she didn’t, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the handwriting on the original note . . . it’s definitely a man’s.”

“And for another?”

He took a swallow of coffee, and then told me flatly, “And for another, her right hand—her dominant hand—had been destroyed, its fingers chewed down to the first knuckles.”

I shuddered, and he continued.

“It’s possible she might’ve written it before . . . whatever occurred, but it seems unlikely. I hope you’ll pardon me, if I preserve some of the details, but even telling you this much is in breach of some very strict protocols. Suffice it to say, the woman didn’t compose this strange missive, but I believe she knew who did. I believe she saw him.”

“Is that what she spoke to you about?”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head again, more slowly this time. “She droned on about the water and the blood, and she cried and cried—mostly about her baby.”

“There was . . . there was a baby?”

“We found its remains scattered across several rooms. Listen, Doctor . . .” He shifted the conversation quickly, but the queasy feeling that arose in my stomach was not so swiftly appeased. “The moment she was left alone, she broke a window and used the glass to slice her wrists, and then her throat. She did such a thorough job that if a physician such as yourself had been on hand when she’d begun, you couldn’t have saved her. No, she was determined. And no, I don’t believe she wrote the missive. Whoever composed it . . . whoever he was . . .” He stared down at the sheet, as if his willpower could compel it to give him more information. “He wants to visit this E. A. Jackson. And I believe that the mysterious doctor is here, somewhere in Fall River.”

Carefully, I said, “What leads you to that conclusion?”

“Miskatonic University leads me to that conclusion.” He withdrew another set of papers from his internal pockets, and for one insane moment I fancied his vest to be a magician’s hat. “For it is upon that campus where yet another incident occurred, and unless I miss my guess, it was the very first.”

He laid out a newspaper article in front of me. I skimmed it, reading with a dull sense of horror that a professor had lost his mind and murdered half a dozen of his peers before vanishing. I checked the date: December 7, the previous year.

“Phillip Zollicoffer.” I read the name aloud. “Went mad and went on a . . . a spree, to use the word we nearly avoided earlier.”

“A madman, to be sure. A brilliant one, with traceable degrees and a career of genius to recommend him. But something snapped, and now I suppose the university will need to hire a few more heads to round out its classrooms,” he said drolly. “And look, it’s the name, you see—here in the note. Zollicoffris. That’s what he calls his ‘sample,’ whatever on earth that might be. When I asked after him at the university, I received more details than I’d ever care to hear, to be frank, but it’s my duty to hear them, and I did. Indeed, he’d been corresponding with Doctor Jackson, who it would seem is quite an authority to be respected, in those circles.”