Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(94)

The laboratory was lit up, not quite bright but at least some of the lights were burning, unlike the upstairs. The illumination had a sickly, greenish glow to it—one I’d never seen before, or had never noticed, at any rate. Was it ordinary for gaslights to cast such a shade? Probably not. Probably nothing was ordinary anymore, and this was the veritable nexus for all the extraordinary things for miles and miles around.

The walls were wet; rivulets of water cascaded here and there, pooling on the floor and draining through the boards. The water smelled like brine and death, like low tide after some great mammal has beached itself and expired. Just as Ebenezer Hamilton had told me.

All the tables were overturned, which inexplicably annoyed me; all the floorboards at one side of the room had been lifted up—for Nance had been searching for something again, but not the stones. Not this time.

She stood barefoot and naked, staring down into a hole.

Watery light washed over her, and her skin looked like the hide of a dolphin, slick and neither dark nor pale, but muted. She was the wrong color. Her body was not quite the wrong shape, but there was something wrong about it all the same. She didn’t turn to look at me, and she didn’t respond when Lizzie called her name.

She didn’t move at all except to wiggle her toes at the edge of that precipice, where I realized with a sudden jolt of horror that the cooker was waiting for her.

Its lid was open. Its dials and buttons were alight, and its contents hummed and smelled terrible. Of course they did. The cooker was ready to cook. It’d been primed and warmed, full of lye and whatever else might turn flesh and bone into syrup, and Nance was staring down into it, as if she were prepared to make a swan dive into that shallow contraption.

“Nance,” I tried.

She didn’t answer me, any more than she’d answered her lover.

Lizzie tried again, and then reached for her—but the girl’s arm lashed out and threw the other woman backward, crashing into a fallen table. It was too light a gesture for such a magnificent blow, too quick and flippant to have cast her across the room, but there it was. Lizzie gasped and clutched her stomach, but I could see she was not badly hurt. She was stunned, and this was not the first time Nance had cast her aside. I could see that, too.

“Nance, what are you doing?” I asked, thinking a question might prompt more response than a mere call of her name.

I was right.

“Fighting,” she whispered.

“You’re . . . you’re fighting? Fighting what?”

“Him.”

Lizzie climbed to her feet; I heard her behind me, gathering her wits and hauling herself upright. But my eyes were fixed on this girl, bare as the day she was born. Tall, and I don’t suppose I’d ever really noticed it. Sturdy, like she’d grown up with manual labor. Had they mentioned something about it? A farm girl, I wanted to say, but wouldn’t have sworn to it.

“Nance, don’t listen to him,” Lizzie pleaded. “Stay here, for the love of God!”

“I’m trying,” she replied.

Lizzie began to cry. Not a delicate cry that could be conquered with a handkerchief, but more of a manly, racking sob that was so full of rage and sorrow that I felt it like a wave, pushing me forward.

I let it push me one step, then another. I was not within arm’s reach of Nance, no—not quite that close. But I was closer, and she hadn’t moved to evade me, or attack me. “Lizzie’s right,” I told her. “You mustn’t listen to him.”

“I know,” she said. It came out bubbly, like she’d said it underwater, or perhaps her lungs were full of slime.

I commanded her, “Back away from that cooker. It’ll be the death of you, and you know it.”

She agreed, and seemed curiously at peace. “That’s what he says. He says it will kill me.”

“Then back away.”

Her head turned, slowly, a slick pivot on her neck that made all the bones look loose beneath her dolphin-wet skin. She looked me in the eye, and for a span of seconds, I saw her wrestling with something. It flickered back and forth, a white milkiness behind her pupils—and the sharp knowledge of the woman whose soul must somehow remain inside.

She was fighting, yes. Just as she’d said.

I said it again: “Step away from the cooker.”

She sneered, but it was not contempt. It was a twisting of her mouth that she couldn’t quite control—more of a spasm than an expression. And she said, “I should save you. I should jump. But he says . . .” She struggled to line up every word, I could hear it in the precision with which she pronounced each individual letter.

“I don’t understand,” I told her.

“I know.” She nodded, and again it looked like her joints were fastening and unfastening, her bones sliding around, rearranging themselves.

Lizzie swallowed a sob and screamed, “Stay with me!”

Then, with a sharp flicker of sorrow, Nance made her decision—or had it made for her. “He won’t let me save you. Won’t let me jump.” She looked at Lizzie now, directly and without blinking. Like the others, she wasn’t blinking anymore. Calm and level, but so unhappy I could feel it in my own bones, when she said, “Or stay.”

Nance shook her head and withdrew, stepping away.

More thunder rollicked through the clouds. It climaxed with a crack so loud that when the lightning came, it was bright enough to illuminate the whole house. Some of it even trickled downstairs, to us. Some of it set the room on fire, and for half a second—maybe less—everything was so clear, so bright.