Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(96)

Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Not just the hot-sparkle chasing and crashing of the light in the clouds, or the roll of thunder—one minute hesitant and shaky, the next a clattering godlike gong that shook the whole town. No, not just that. Everything.

Nance was gone, and I had to find her.

My lover was alive again, running again. Moving and speaking, as I’d begun to fear I’d never see again. She was herself again, if somewhat changed—not hideously, no. Not like the other people so afflicted with the sickness and insanity. No, she was still her own beautiful self: tall and strong, capable and kind, quick and funny, and sharp and loving.

I stood still and panted, making some halfhearted effort to stop gasping and start breathing normally, despite the cinch of my undergarments objecting to every deeply drawn lungful of air. Where was there to go? Fall River sat between the ocean and the woods.

Between the two, she’d go find the ocean.

I knew it in my soul, and the knowing made me weak with dread. It’s as Emma and her Darwinian colleagues suggest, isn’t it? All life emerging, cell by cell, fin to foot, from the ocean—to form a bipedal ape that walks and talks and breathes, and creates poetry and cities and gods.





? ? ?


Can it be that ugly and easy?

We crawled primordial from the water, our grand-ancestors times a million generations; we escaped the tides, the sharks, and the leviathans of the deep, only to find ourselves on land—where we became the things we’d sought to escape, and we invented gods to blame. Not gods of the ocean, for we’d been to the ocean, and seen that the water was empty of the divine. Not gods of the earth, for we have walked upon the dirt, and we are alone here.

So we install our gods in the sky, because we haven’t yet eliminated the firmament as a possibility.

Next, I suppose, we’ll send them into space—where I expect they will live a very long time indeed, for it shall take us another million generations of descendants to reach them, and learn that they are projections of light and story, cast into the heavens by us alone. And we will be alone again (unless by then, we discover some more distant place in which to hide our image).

Over and over again, we lift God out of our reach. Over and over, push Him beyond our grasp, yet still we stretch out our fingers and seek to touch Him.

But find nothing.





? ? ?


If Nance had gone to the ocean, I would go to the ocean, too.

I would chase her there, to the shore. To the pier, I supposed—though why I would leap to this conclusion, I do not know. Call it instinct, or call it that bond that joins humans when they have shared flesh, and held one another’s bones. Call it dumb luck if you like.

If there are no gods, there should be luck, at least.

And if there are gods after all, perhaps we should not struggle so hard to get their attention, if this is the attention they would lavish upon us.





? ? ?


To the shore, then.

I ran the whole way, clutching my axe by the middle of its handle to keep it from swinging; I pushed my feet forward, running below the ever-churning, ever-rolling, ever-noisy sky and wondering if there would be any rain at all—for none had fallen yet. No sprinkles, no deluge. Only the whisper-sharp tang of lightning, that scorched electrical smell that comes before a strike.

But none of the lightning touched me. It only showed me the way, all the way down to the water where the pier was located, and where the Hamilton family once had a shop, and where I would push my sister in her wheeled chair, so that she could climb out and sit or lie on the rocks and warm her body on the sunnier days. Pretending we were taking a holiday someplace nice, where no one knew who we were. Chatting about the tide pools. Poking sticks into holes in the sand, and finding strange samples there—specimens to discuss or to send by post to monsters in other towns.

A hard, sharp shout of light—and I saw her, or I thought I did. More importantly, I believed I did—and I screamed her name at the top of my lungs, even though nothing could’ve heard me over the celestial furor, the thunder coming so fast, one roll after another. It’d come to sound like a low, magnificent hum not merely above me, but around me. Inside me.

I almost stopped hearing it.

I almost couldn’t hear my own voice, crying for Nance.

But she did. I’m certain she did—and I’m certain it was her, too. I saw her in silhouette, and then in a too-white flicker when she faced me, and her skin was as bright as a shark’s belly. Her face was flat and featureless, and it’s true that I was some distance away, but I could not make out so much as a pair of dark holes where her eyes must have been, or the horizontal slash of her mouth. She faced me, but didn’t see me. She was being erased.

I tried her name again, but this time the phantasm turned its head and vanished—or rather, when the next stroke of lightning cut the darkness a moment later, it was gone. She was gone.

I ran toward the spot where last I saw her; I was still carrying the axe, though I scarcely felt the weight of it. I felt only the wind, tearing at my dress and dragging at my hair; I felt only the misery and fear of knowing Nance was there, but not there.

I reached the edge of the street, and there was nowhere left to go except for the pier immediately before me, or onto the naked, jutting rocks that flanked it on either side. They clustered between the water and the sand, monuments of basalt and granite or whatever stony barriers the ocean best prefers when it throws up walls to keep us out.