Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(89)

“That’s brave of you, and reasonable, too.” I then explained why the toxoid might provoke a more vigorous reaction, and did my best to reassure her without being cruel. “It may help her, or at the very worst, it will have no effect.”

“It won’t infect her with tetanus? I’ve heard infection is a concern with some inoculations, but I know almost nothing about this one.”

“It will not,” I promised, uncertain of whether or not I was lying. But it’s as I said: the girl is dying anyway. Our best hope is to see her improved, or passed away before she can harm anyone else.

Lizzie accepted my promises, and I felt a twinge of guilt—but nothing I couldn’t ignore. This was for the best. And for all I knew, I was telling the truth.

It’s a hard line to take, but I’ve taken it before.

During the war, every day was a hundred such choices, a hundred opportunities to kill or save, and a hundred spins of the roulette wheel—tempted and tilted with nothing but our prayers.

And here I am again. Throwing prayers at pathogens, invocations against monsters.

No. I have more than that, this time. Or I will, given time.

Dear God, give us time.





Emma L. Borden


MAY 5, 1894

Soon.

Very soon. It’s not that I can “feel” him, as the doctor keeps asking me; it’s not that I can sense the tug of him, like Lizzie senses the green stones. (And as I have sensed them before, to a lesser degree.) It’s simple math that leads me to my conclusion. He’s been approaching long enough, and this is no Greek paradox. Eventually, the monster must arrive.

Lizzie asked if I was afraid. I told her no.

Seabury asked if I was feeling well. I told him yes.

Some days I am afraid. Some days I feel weak. Nothing is really untrue anymore, much as nothing really makes sense. Seabury can go on and on about his patterns, and I don’t think he’s strictly mistaken; but likewise, he surely is not strictly correct. He tries to engage me with his theories, and I try to listen. It’s not that I don’t understand them; it’s that I find his efforts toward companionship difficult to reconcile, given his betrayal, and now his trust—as if I’m some partner. Or no, that’s not it. Not exactly. He does not view me as a peer. He treats me like a student, and I have little patience for it.

He would not have shown such casual, well-meaning disrespect to E. A. Jackson. No, of course not. That’s why I guarded my other name, my other self so closely. And there you see the fissure between us now.

He thinks he’s mending a fence, but he’s digging a trench.





? ? ?


I let him inoculate me against tetanus, because it seemed to make him happy. He wants so badly to help, and we all so badly need the help, that it would’ve been silly to refuse. Just like it was silly for Lizzie to initially fight about dosing Nance with the tetani samples. It was ridiculous of her, given how long and loudly she’s complained about having no action to take, no hopeful means of bringing her lover back around.

But eventually Lizzie acquiesced, and from the sounds of things, there’s been some slight, barely perceptible change in the right direction for our bed-bound guest. An improvement in her respiration, a decline in the fever that has left her sweating through the sheets, soaking great yellow stains down to the mattress.

But for all we know, these are only the signs of an imminent end.

We can’t really control her—that much has been established. We tie her to the bed, but at night, when no one watches, she frees herself and wanders down to the cellar, or throws herself into the tub, or whatever else her somnambulistic brain finds appropriate. Now, I suppose, we insist upon the ties for the insurance of having done so, should anyone learn of our plight and ask us why we didn’t do anything.

Well, we did. That’s what we’ll tell them. We tried everything. And we stuck to it, even when it didn’t really work. The times, they were desperate indeed.

But I doubt anyone will ever inquire.





? ? ?


We’ve proceeded this far into darkness largely because no one wants to be seen talking to us, or visiting us, or otherwise providing any ordinary human interaction. We’re starved for it, prevented from it except for our new old friend the doctor—whose presence no longer gives me any joy at all—and we’ve been starved for years.

That’s our punishment, I guess. Since they couldn’t convict my sister, and they couldn’t banish us to memory. Since she went free, and we stayed here. They will ignore us . . . and in that way, they get what they want. They get to behave as if nothing ever happened.

To hell with Fall River.

Things happened.

And things are happening still, so many things that even the blind, bored, petty, avoidant people of this godforsaken little burg are being forced to sit up and notice. This time they cannot blame any strangeness on my sister.

They might blame it on me, if they knew how—but they’d be wrong.

In part. I summoned Zollicoffer with the sample; that’s my cross to bear, and I’ll carry it with these withered shoulders because apparently I have no choice. It was an accident, a simple act of friendliness that somehow warped into one of evil summoning, and I do not understand how. But I understand and accept my place in this otherworldly passion play.