Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(75)

Lizzie’s feet clomped slowly down the stairs. She’d been up there, checking on Nance. I assumed there was no news on the girl’s condition, or else she would’ve told us about it. Instead, she pointed out something so obvious that it hadn’t yet sprung to my mind.

She said, “The specimen and the murders. The creatures who come, and the people in town who are likewise losing their battles with madness. They’re all connected. They’re all pieces in one large, awful puzzle.”

Seabury quickly agreed. “The deaths Wolf described had much in common with those I’ve seen in Fall River. We’d be daft if we ignored the possibility that they’re related.”

“But how?” Lizzie asked, with such exhaustion and desperation that my heart nearly broke for her.

“Perhaps the monsters are causing it . . . ?” Seabury suggested.

Lizzie didn’t think so. “We don’t know what we’re fighting, not really. The creatures that come around after dark . . . they must be a symptom of something, not a cause. I can’t shake that feeling, and I don’t think any of this new information contradicts the possibility.”

“Symptoms . . . ,” the doctor mused. “Yes. We may be thinking about this the wrong way, or . . . or I don’t know if there’s a right way, but we ought to think about it another way.”

My sister settled into the settee at the far end from Doctor Seabury. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I’ve tried everything, but all this time I’ve been fighting blind. The creatures and the murders—we can think of them as symptoms, pieces of a bigger whole, but at the moment I’ll be damned if I can figure out what that bigger whole might look like.”

Seabury held out his hands, using them to gesture while he talked—explaining on top of his explanations. He had an idea, and he was getting excited.

“Here at Maplecroft, you’ve been treating all this as if it were supernatural—and reasonably enough, might I add. There’s nothing natural about what’s occurring, but let us approach it as science. Or more particularly, let us call it medicine,” he said with emphasis. “If we were to examine this town as if it had contracted an illness, where would we begin? How would the first symptoms present themselves?”

Lizzie opened her eyes, and at first she stared off into the distance. Then she said, “Changes in behavior. Of ordinary people, I mean.”

“All right,” he said with something perilously akin to cheer. “One moment, let me find my way to some paper and a pencil . . .” And when these things were acquired, he used the coffee table for a writing desk. “Yes. So. Changes. Can you be more precise? I assume you didn’t wake up one morning and find yourself in need of an axe.”

Not his most delicate handling of a subject, but she didn’t seem to take it amiss. She only answered, “Sleeping more.”

“Sensitivity to light,” I added, recalling a day when our father screamed at me to close the curtains, for the sunlight was killing him. His wife had done similar, and by the time the end came ’round, we were all living in the dark.

He echoed me as he composed. Then he said, “Now, not everyone will have all these exact same symptoms. Nance did not, is that correct? She simply fell into the catatonic state?”

“She had . . . some symptoms,” Lizzie qualified. “She became obsessed with the basement, obsessed to distraction. She’d stare at the door so long, so hard, that it was as if she’d become a somnambulist overnight.”

“Father had taken to sleepwalking, too,” I pointed out. “I caught him once, in the middle of the night. I thought he was planning to jump out a window, and crawl for the ocean.” That might have been a strange way to phrase it, but it’s what sprang to mind.

“Somnambulism.” He added that to the list.

“Changes in diet,” Lizzie supplied. “That’s another one. No one cooked anything anymore. Only cold food. That part happened gradually. God, I wish I’d kept some sort of journal at the time. I could’ve traced this better, in retrospect.”

“You had no way of knowing,” he told her, without taking his eyes away from the growing list of issues. And when we couldn’t think of anything else, he said, “Very well, let’s move on to the more demonstrable, physical symptoms in the afflicted. Tell me more about your parents.”

“The eyes,” Lizzie and I said at once, startling ourselves.

Then I amended the thought. “A certain dullness to them. A constantly dilated pupil . . . but then again, it’s as I said—we were living in the dark.”

“And eventually, they stopped blinking,” my sister concluded.

Seabury paused, his pencil hovering over the sheet. “Yes. I’ve seen that symptom, too. In Matthew,” he murmured. “I noticed it, but didn’t know what it meant.”

“And then the slowness comes . . . ,” Lizzie said as well. The closer we came to the details of death, the more quietly all of us spoke.

“Slowness,” he jotted.

I added, “Their skin—it changed, became paler. They took on a bloated appearance.”

He swallowed hard, licked his lower lip, and said, “I saw it. In your stepmother. Not in time to do anything about it, but I know precisely what you mean.”