Maplecroft

by Cherie Priest

  Shaking my head, I tried to clear it, even as I felt my grip on the jar sliding—very slightly—as it slipped through my fingers, down to the top of my desk.

  I came to my senses in time to prevent a crash; I squeezed my hand like a vise and set the item down. Before I could talk myself into some other course of action, I peered into the jar, at the oozing thing within—with the added advantage of the magnifier and the nearby lamp.

  Immediately beneath my desk table top, there’s a drawer. I reached inside it and retrieved a set of long steel pincers with the hand which wasn’t holding the handkerchief to my nose, and I used these pincers to prod at the thing within the jar.

  It sloshed, and when I made a general attempt to pierce it (in order to judge its consistency) I found the task more difficult than expected. The thing was fleshy and dense, approximately the same as a sea-jelly—a diagnosis which now seemed likely, if imprecise. I needed to see it spread out; I needed to prod at its appendages, if it had any, and take proper measurements.

  I then did what I should’ve done in the first place: I relocated to the chemical sink against the far wall. (It’d been installed three years previously, after some disagreements between myself and two other faculty members regarding usage of the facilities down the corridor. I fancied that this new one was “mine,” and I could do with it as I liked . . . even if what I liked stank up the place and stained everything I touched.)

  After a bit of hunting, I tracked down the drain plug and affixed it, then in one fell swoop I upturned the jar and dumped its contents into the enamel basin. It dropped and slid in a slippery roll, rollicking to a halt and sprawling out into a truer approximation of its original shape.

  I retrieved my lamp and dragged it over to the sink.

  The sink became a veritable theater—brilliantly lit, and with me the sole audience member, gazing upon the single player plopped upon the stage.

  How to describe such a thing? Let me attempt it.

  I’ve already recorded the texture, dense and fleshy. Its color was akin to old bones, except for the aforementioned greenish blue streaks and blotches. The creature—for it was definitely a creature, and no plant—demonstrated radial symmetry, perhaps pentamerism. Difficult to say. One portion of the thing looked as if it’d been torn, perhaps grabbed by a predator or snagged upon a rock. Overall, it lacked the traditional cuplike shape of Scyphozoa and more closely resembled something from a “stalked” class of sea-jellies.

  The thing is a true puzzle, and I am overjoyed to have made its acquaintance!

  But a more formal analysis will have to be postponed until later. I have a classroom full of students awaiting at the other end of campus, and if I’m more than a few minutes late, the whole lot of them will accuse me of abandonment and walk out.

  Lizzie Andrew Borden

  MARCH 17, 1894

  Emma was frantic, and can’t be blamed for it. I hadn’t responded in my usual timely fashion, having been mellowed or stunned or mesmerized by the stones, and she could hear something outside, sniffing around, nosing closer.

  When I reached the top of the stairs I unlocked and flung open the cellar door. My sister fell against me, but there was no time to catch her properly or comfort her—not while I held the axe, and not while something struggled to breach our stronghold. Her eyes were wild as I lifted her with my free arm. She toppled against my breasts and rapped her cheek against my shoulder. Her strength had been all but spent to bring me ’round, and now she was wasted, exhausted, unable to even stand. A smudge of half-wiped blood streaked from the corner of her mouth, down her jawline, and into her hair.

  Had I done this? Had I brought the uncanny intruder to Maplecroft with my reverie, my stupid fascination with the contents of that iron-capped box?

  I suspected already that the bizarre sea glass and the strange fiends operated in some unholy conjunction, and I wished to know more about their connection, to better judge how closely they were aligned. But not then. Not at the expense of my sister’s life or sanity.

  “Emma, wait here,” I said, and I let her lean on me as she slid to the floor, into a seated position. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “The creature . . . it’s around back. I saw it, at the kitchen window. Its hands . . .”

  “Shush, don’t talk now. Stay here.”

  She seized my sleeve as I rose away from her. “Don’t leave me alone, with nothing to defend myself!” She did not ask, “What if you fail? What then will I do?” But the questions were implied, and though I did not intend to fail her, I understood her terror.

  I squeezed her hand and saw that her knuckles were bruised, flushed, and welling blood. I dropped her battered fingers and hastened around the corner to the parlor, to our father’s old cabinet, which had once been stocked with his favorite spirits and crystal decanters. Now it was also stocked with a pair of pistols, likewise once his own.

  I seized them both, knowing that both were loaded.

  I ran back to the cellar door, shut it, and dropped the guns into Emma’s lap. They looked so heavy in her hands when she lifted them and checked to see that they were ready. She knew how to shoot because I’d taught her, and I had to trust that she’d defend herself ably should the worst occur.

  But I warned her, “Don’t be an eager shot, dear—I’m not going outside yet. Stay quiet.”

  She nodded with understanding. She knew the routine. Silence and darkness.

  Taking my axe along for the tour, I went from room to room on our first floor and extinguished the gas lamps until nothing but the streetlamps cast illumination into our space. It was feeble light, fractured and prismatic, sent through the leaded-glass trestle and the street-facing windows, but it was enough for me to orient myself, and to feel as if I now had the space to listen.

  I closed my eyes and opened them again, letting the darkness adjust my vision. I stood in the center of the large front room, strange lines and shadows marking me like a nightmare’s checkerboard. I could see the patterns on my dress, slashing dark lines and light grooves across my skirts and down my arms. The tattoos of brightness shifted when I shifted, raising the axe and feeling its heft settle across my shoulder as I waited, squinting at the night outside and wondering where the would-be intruder had gone off to.

  Where was it?

  Emma said the kitchen; she’d seen it at the window. It wouldn’t be there still. It would’ve tried to follow her, circling, tracking her through sound or scent or whatever it is these things use to perceive the world.

  Mostly they seem to be blind, or to see very poorly. But they feel . . . they pat the walls, they lunge at the boards, they trip and scuttle and scramble up our stairs when they stumble across them. They press their weird, webbed hands against the windows and leave prints on the glass in the shape of starfish.

  I held as motionless as possible, hearing only the creak of my breath against my clothing, the bones of my undergarments giving and resisting, the cinch of my tied belt stretching, the small stitches in small seams straining to contain me. And then I heard it, against the south wall. It must’ve been standing in the long, narrow rose garden, as if a thing like that cared a whit about catching thorns or treading on blossoms.

  It wheezed and hissed, feeling its way along the exterior. The timbre of its flailing slaps changed when it reached the small side porch, and when it smacked the steps, and then the foundation stones as it relentlessly sought an entrance. It moved widdershins like the devil himself, and it made no sound apart from the exploratory jabs with its hands and the susurrous whistles of its breath coming and going.

  Having pinpointed the brute thusly, I steeled myself and crept to the front door. Silently, or nearly so, I slipped outside and shut the door behind me with only the faintest of clicks. I took my key and fastened the lock as well, sealing Emma within to the best of my ability.

  (I shuddered to consider it, but there was always the possibility of more than one interloper. Only once have I
seen them work in pairs, but once is enough. It introduces the possibility of a second time, and for that, I invest in very good bolts.)

  I stepped carefully through the covered porch area, keeping my steps as light as I could manage. My boots had low heels, but even low heels can tap and warn—so I tiptoed to the secondary door and unlatched it. It was a flimsy portal, intended more for show than for protection. I let myself out and shut it anyway, and it slipped into the frame with a muffled scuffing that felt terribly loud in the nighttime quietude.

  I crept down the half dozen short steps to the ground, where the grass was more forgiving than the sanded slats of the porch. I moved through it swiftly, the rustle of the tiny green leaves whispering no more loudly than the sway of my underskirts around my legs as I trotted to the left, to the corner, where I paused and readied myself.

  I heard the slithering, damp coughs of the creature very close by. Its exhalations gusted with the smattering strikes of its hands as it sought entry.

  If I did not stop this thing, it would find a way inside.

  Eventually it would break a window and sense the space within, and come crawling through—just like its uncanny brethren had done when we lived across town. When my father and Mrs. Borden were alive. (Though they were not themselves anymore. Not by then.)

  I raised the axe, holding it aloft over my shoulder but slightly to the side—ready to swing in a deadly arc, at the approximate head level of a person-shaped thing. I adjusted the trajectory, opting to aim lower. My trespasser might be smaller than I. Better to risk a strike too low than to swing too high and miss.

  On an internal count of three, I stepped swiftly around the corner and charged forward, headlong, bringing the axe wide and throwing all my strength behind it.

  The creature turned its face to me.

  I cannot say that it looked at me. I cannot say that those film-covered eyes could see anything, though I detected the dark orbs of pupils twitching left to right beneath some silvery membrane.

  Its skin did not glow. It would be more accurate to say that it gleamed dully in whatever shreds of cast-off light reached us from the streetlamps at the distant corner. But the dull gleam was very, very white without appearing clean—the wet-looking pallor of boiled eggs, or navy beans left too long in a pot.

  The thing’s stretched-tight skin was translucent enough to show the inner workings of organs wrestling for space, jostling together in that narrow torso cavity that scarcely looked large enough to hold a rolled-up newspaper.

  I’m saying this wrong. I’m making it sound fragile, or ill.

  It was not. They never are.

  Their muscles are thin as laundry lines, strong as steel. Their teeth, when they brandish them, are jabbing spikes as fine and terrible as needles.

  The swing of my axe caught this creature in those teeth. They shattered like glass.

  • • •

  I’d been right to aim low. The visitor was a full head shorter than I. Almost childlike, if you wished to compare something so malicious and inhuman to the size of something innocent and mortal.

  I’d pushed the axe with enough momentum, enough weight, enough of my own not-inconsiderable strength, that it came very close to decapitating the brute in one blow. Broken teeth glittered as they flew through the air; they stuck onto the gore-covered axe-head when I retracted it and went to swing again.

  But the creature wriggled and fell, ducking away from my second blow—which slammed into the house instead. Windows above me rattled, not breaking but shuddering. The axe stuck in the siding. I wrenched at it, and retrieved it.

  My adversary lurched to its feet once more, and the top of its head flipped open and backward, clinging to the whole of its shape by nothing but gristle and tendons, but this did not stop it. Whether or not it could think, or feel, or see, or bite . . . minus all the obvious faculties to do so . . . I have no idea.

  But it could attack.

  It rushed toward me, but I was ready. I’d seen this trick before, how they could function like the worst vermin, the most disgusting bugs that could eat and fornicate and lay eggs . . . though their brains have been smashed to bits.

  This one came at me the same way, its fingers fanning to show the connective webbing between them, and to brandish the curved claws they all boasted. Its head swung down between its shoulder blades, dangling there and spewing the green and brown bile that serves for their fluids.

  It ducked and I slashed with the heavy blade—and the creature leaned in for me. It tumbled forward and snared my skirt, which ripped as I pulled away and then, because there was no room for me to rear back for another swipe, I shifted the axe in my grip and brought it up again—from underneath, and to my left. I leaned backward, shifting my center like a pendulum and whipping the weapon forward.

  I caught the damnable thing below the throat. The axe shattered its sternum, and hacked up through its neck. Its lower jaw flew away, scattering more sparkling teeth in the garden roses, and in the grass.

  It staggered.

  I finished it. I kicked out my boot and caught it in the chest, shoving it back to the ground, where it writhed, clutching all its injured parts and gushing those terrible, foul-smelling fluids. I stood over it, and I bashed it again and again with the axe, until the pulp of its chest caved inward and the throbbing organs ceased their gruesome pumping.

  When at last it was still, I dropped the axe-head to the ground and leaned on the handle, catching my breath as I gazed down upon my handiwork and listened to the sound of my heart pounding in my ears.

  Thank God, I heard nothing else.

  No curious neighbors, no late-night passersby wondering what went on at Maplecroft, where the notorious spinsters hid themselves like fugitives, and rarely showed their faces.

  But this did not mean I had any time to waste.

  Collecting my thoughts and my strength once more, I drove the axe deep into what was left of the thing’s chest and dragged it that way, around to the backyard, into the deeper shadows and well beyond any chance of being spotted from the street. I heaved it along to the cellar’s exterior entrance and fished in my pocket for the rest of my keys. Although I was warm and flushed from exertion, my hands conspired against me, and were cold. My fingers shook. Every small sound startled me, setting me yet further on edge.

  But the big locks on the great double doors did eventually click, and I lifted the right one up, tilting it on its hinges, revealing a set of stone stairs.

  My axe was still lodged in the brute, buried in the wreckage of its ribs. I took hold of the handle and drew the creature to the edge of the precipice, then swung its body over the stairs. I snapped my wrist, shaking the axe hard and fast. The corpse ragdolled itself to the bottom.

  I followed more slowly behind it, drawing the cellar door down behind me and fastening the interior locks. The exterior set would have to wait, for now. I could return to them later, when I was finished cleaning up.

  The battered remains smelled disgusting. Whatever these things circulate for blood, it is more foul than anything I could imagine for comparison purposes. The liquid itself congeals quickly when exposed to air, forming a nasty jelly the color of coffee—which meant I’d be scrubbing the steps and wiping down the floors before bedtime, whether I liked it or not. There’s only so much evidence I can stand to live with overnight.

  Using the axe to keep the corpse at arm’s distance, I shoved, nudged, and leveraged the squishy, crunchy sack of skin over to the largest trapdoor—the one next to the slot where I keep the dreaded green stones contained and concealed.

  I opened this horizontal cabinet to reveal the most expensive appliance in Maplecroft. Truly, it’s a work of art. It’s almost a shame that no one ever sees it.

  Privately I think of it as “the cooker,” a perfectly gruesome description that no doubt says something awful about my mental state, or possibly my sense of humor. But I’ve learned the hard way that simply burying the inhuman little bodies is insufficient. As they de
cay, their odor becomes increasingly unbearable, even when smothered with several feet of earth. Worse yet, it attracts more of their loathsome kind. And then what? Do I kill every intruder, every strange, murderous invader of dubious origin? After a while, I’d surely run out of places to bury them. Our yard is not so large that I can afford the space for a cemetery of the weird.

  No, the cooker is the only reasonable means of getting rid of them.

  It cost a small fortune, and I had to bring in a man from out of state to set it up. I couldn’t risk any of the locals gossiping about it. That’s the last thing Emma and I need, especially now that we seem to be watched by more than just the usual neighbors, who remain convinced that I’ve somehow escaped justice.

  • • •

  (They wait for me to make a mistake, to reveal some telltale clue or make some offhanded incriminating statement. They think they know the truth, and to a certain extent, they do. But they do not know the whole of it, and I am careful. I must be, for my sake and Emma’s. For the whole of Fall River’s sake, too. I do not know if I can save us all, but I have to try.)

  • • •

  I reached down into the cabinet in my floor and gripped a metal latch. I turned it, and a small handle released with a pop. I cranked it, and the cooker’s heavy lid ratcheted upward.

  The cooker is essentially an oversized version of a cast-iron pressure device—thus my revolting shorthand for it. Made of steel rather than iron, it is heated by a complicated system of pipes that siphon gas from the same household system that powers our lights. These pipes work together to heat the cooker well beyond normal boiling temperatures, necessitating the ring of asbestos that lines the cabinet—thirteen inches deep, on all sides—lest I inadvertently set fire to the place. This lining cradles an oversized metal basin. The basin is filled with lye.