Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(97)

I did not shriek for Nance again, because it was clear now that even if she caught my voice, even if she remembered her name and recognized it—and recognized me, and knew that I loved her—it was not enough to hold her here. My voice was not enough to make her stay.

I scanned the pier, the large rows of rocks that stood huddled like soldiers in poor formation. I checked the street behind me and the trees, houses, and merchant stalls back behind that.

Nothing. No one.

For all I knew, I was the only person alive in Fall River.

The light-frosted sky told me nothing, until I heard some strange new sound, a howling not drawn from the wind scraping against the unsettled waves. Whatever storm battered Fall River, it did not make this cry—this unearthly, inhuman, unlikely, and unbelievable wail that came from . . . below or maybe beyond the water, I think. It came from the ocean, off in the distance—this high-pitched groan that carried on the storm the undercurrents of a creak, a squeal, like a great door opening or a lion’s mouth stretching into a yawn.

It was a living cry; that’s what I mean to say. Not the insensate noise of a ship leaning or a tree beginning to break; it was a sound made on purpose, by something that wished to be heard. Yet it must also be said that this sound was mechanical in nature—or its underpinnings seemed that way to me. I heard chains, unspooling. Metal on metal. Rusted cogs objecting to the thought of being turned, but turning nonetheless.

I did not have long to muse about the sound’s nature or origins, for I saw her again.

Only for a flicker, for the briefest shaved moment of a second.

On the rocks, to the left. On the tumbled boulders worn smooth and treacherous by the tide, moving across them as easily as Christ must have walked upon the sea. She moved steadily, but the motion of her limbs was not natural—her bare skin gleaming and wet; she looked like she had too many limbs, clinging and rattling, crablike, across the stones. (She had a center that did not move, only dangled between clicking, clattering, clawing appendages that gripped the uneven terrain and navigated it soundly, for all their strangeness.)

I tried her name again, but without any force this time. She wasn’t listening to me. She was listening to the cry that rose up out of the waves, and I wondered if this was the cry of Zollicoffer—of the monster who hounded us, and who must have surely arrived in Fall River by now.

Had he met us here? Now? Finally?

But no, that couldn’t be right. The mad professor would be coming by land. Whatever wet god summoned Nance from the Atlantic, this must be what called to him, too. The monster that calls to monster. The evil so great that it draws all other evil like a lodestone.

(Is this what we fled, when we left the ocean? Did we grow legs so we could run away?)

Somewhere in the back of my head, I wondered if Zollicoffer hadn’t already arrived at Maplecroft. He would stop there first, wouldn’t he? He might be there already.

But there was no turning around now. I’d picked my path, and this is where it led me—after Nance, down to the water. Onto the immense, uneven boulders that keep watch over the place where the water meets the shore.

I slipped and stumbled, for my shoes were not made to prance across boulders wet with tide and the ocean spray. I was not dressed for beachcombing or swimming; I was not ready to fight the slick stones for handholds, so I crawled gracelessly across them, between them, through them—always toward Nance, who was moving toward the waves.

I lost my footing, or my handing. I lost something, anyway.

I tumbled down into a small valley, a damp, sandy stretch between two stones, and the spot was filled with water up to my knees. My feet sank and struggled, and I shoved my hands against the boulders on either side of me. I dragged myself forward.

The sky above me still flickered violently with the lightning that never struck, and only scattered.

I had no idea where I was, or how I’d find my way past the rocks and out to the open water. I didn’t know where Nance was, and she was my guiding light. Perhaps I’d die down there between the stones, and turn up bleached and dead when the waves went back out again.

It would not have been the worst of all outcomes.

But that wasn’t what happened.





? ? ?


I dredged my shoes out of the sandy muck one after another, hefting them up and forcing my feet forward. I braced my hands on the stones beside me, and I moved incrementally toward the ocean—even as the water level rose past my knees, to my thighs, to my hips—and I wondered if the tide was coming in, or if I was only making progress. I didn’t know, and couldn’t remember what the schedule was that day. The timetables would’ve been in the paper, but I hadn’t read it. It’d seemed such a small and unimportant thing, so irrelevant . . . but now I was wishing I’d taken a glance, so that I’d know for certain whether or not I was charging toward my death.

Nance was somewhere above and beyond me, and I was waist-deep in water, half swimming and half clambering past the last of the rocks before I knocked my leg against something like a step. Not a stair, exactly, but a place where the grade changed—and I could draw myself up out of the water.

Hand over hand, foot over foot, and soaked to the bone, I rose.

I dropped myself atop the nearest, flattest boulder and stayed there on all fours. I couldn’t imagine standing in that wind; I couldn’t stagger upright against the waves that hurtled around me, crashing and spraying, dousing me in splash after splash.