Brimstone
PRAISE FOR THE BORDEN DISPATCHES
CHAPELWOOD
“Devious, twisted, and beautifully written.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry
“Add to that smart subtext a young female protagonist who is more than capable of rescuing herself, thank you very much, plus an ending that doesn’t fit the expected beats of a climactic ending but is incredibly satisfying—and Chapelwood becomes much more than a Lovecraft knockoff. It is wholly and wonderfully itself.”
—Locus
“[A] gripping Lovecraftian thriller. . . . Readers will want more adventures with Borden and Wolf.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Well-written . . . it has fantastic atmosphere and [a] sense of dread.”
—Smart Bitches Trashy Books
“An intricate, frightening story . . . Chapelwood was an engrossing read that scared me and gave me hope at the same time. I’m ready for the next one.”
—Fantasy Literature
MAPLECROFT
“A remarkable novel, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. It is at once a dark historical fantasy with roots buried deep in real-life horror and a supernatural thriller mixing Victorian drama and Lovecraftian myth. You won’t be able to put it down.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden
“Maplecroft is dark and lyrical, haunting and brined in blood. It is as sharp as Lizzie Borden’s axe—and Borden herself is a horror heroine bar none. Cherie Priest is our new queen of darkness.”
—Chuck Wendig, author of Zeroes
“A wild, awesome page-turner. . . . Priest has taken the real-life historical details of the Borden murders . . . and turned them into one of the best Lovecraftian stories I’ve ever read.”
—io9
ALSO BY CHERIE PRIEST
THE BORDEN DISPATCHES
Maplecroft
Chapelwood
ACE
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Cherie Priest
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Priest, Cherie, author.
Title: Brimstone/Cherie Priest.
Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046116 (print) | LCCN 2016054058 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101990735 (softcover) | ISBN 9781101990742 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION/Fantasy/Historical. | FICTION/Horror. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Horror fiction. | Occult fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.R537 B75 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.R537 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046116
First Edition: April 2017
Cover art by Rovina Cai
Cover design by Katie Anderson
Title page art deco frame © maximmmmum / Shutterstock Images
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
This is dedicated to everyone in Cassadaga, Florida— for you were all so unfailingly gracious and kind to this nosy writer who wanted to tell a weird little story about your hometown. Thank you for your thoughts, suggestions, and encouragement.
I’m glad your lake is coming back.
Contents
Praise for the Borden Dispatches
Also by Cherie Priest
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 2: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 3: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 4: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 5: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 6: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 7: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 8: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 9: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 10: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 11: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 12: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 13: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 14: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 15: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 16: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 17: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 18: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 19: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 20: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 21: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 22: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 23: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 24: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 25: ALICE DARTLE
Chapter 26: TOMÁS CORDERO
Chapter 27: ALICE DARTLE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
ALICE DARTLE
Aboard the Seaboard Express, bound for Saint Augustine, Florida
JANUARY 1, 1920
LAST NIGHT, SOMEONE dreamed of fire.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t make note of such a thing in my journal—after all, there’s no subject half so tedious as someone else’s dream. One’s own dream might be fascinating, at least until it’s described aloud—at which point one is inevitably forced to admit how ridiculous it sounds. But someone else’s? Please, bore me with the weather instead.
However, this is a long train ride, and I have finished reading the newspaper, my book, and both of the magazines I put in my bag for the trip. Truly, I underestimated my appetite for the printed word.
It’s a circular thing, this tedium, this nuisance of rolling wheels on a rumbling track and scenery whipping past the window, because my options are miserably limited. Once I’m out of reading material, there’s nothing to do but sit and stare, unless I want to sit and write something to sit and stare at later on. So with that in mind, here I go—nattering to these pages with a pencil that needs sharpening and an unexpected subject on my mind: There was a man, and he dreamed of fire, and I could smell it as if my own hair were alight.
Whoever he was, this man was lying on a bed with an iron frame, listening to the foggy notes of a phonograph playing elsewhere in his house. Did he forget to turn it off? Did he leave it running on purpose, in order to soothe himself to sleep? I didn’t recognize the song, but popular music is a mystery to me, so my failure to identify the title means nothing.
This man (and I’m sure it was a man) was drifting in that nebulous space between awake and a nap, and he smelled the dream smoke so he followed it into something that wasn’t quite a nightmare. I must say it wasn’t quite a nightmare, because at first he was not at all afraid. He followed the smoke eagerly, chasing it like a lifeline, like bread crumbs, or, no—like a ball of yarn unspooled through a labyrinth. He clutched it with his whole soul and followed it into the darkness. He tracked it through halls and corridors and trenches . . . yes, I’m confident that there were trenches, like the kind men dug duri
ng the war. He didn’t like the trenches. He saw them, and that’s when the dream tilted into nightmare territory. That’s when he felt the first pangs of uncertainty.
Whatever the man thought he was following, he did not expect it to lead him there.
• • •
HE’D seen those trenches before. He’d hidden and hunkered, a helmet on his head and a mask on his face, crouched in a trough of wet dirt while shells exploded around him.
• • •
YES, the more I consider it—the more I pore over the details of that man’s dream, at least as I can still recall them—the more confident I am: Whoever he is, he must be a soldier. He fought in Europe, but he isn’t there anymore. I do not think he’s European. I think he’s an American, and I think our paths shall cross. Sooner rather than later.
I don’t have any good basis for this string of hunches, but that’s never stopped me before, and my hunches are usually right. So I’ll go ahead and record them here, in case the particulars become important later.
Here are a few more: When I heard his dream, I heard seabirds and I felt a warm breeze through an open window. I smelled the ocean. Maybe this man is in Florida. I suspect that I’ll meet him in Cassadaga.
• • •
HOW far is Cassadaga from the Atlantic? I wonder.
I looked at a map before I left Norfolk, but I’m not very good at maps. Well, my daddy said there’s no place in Florida that’s terribly far from the water, so I’ll cross my fingers and hope there’s water nearby. I’ll miss the ocean if I’m ever too far away from it.
I already miss Norfolk a bit, and I’ve been gone only a few hours. But I’ve made my choice, and I’m on my way. Soon enough, I’ll be in Saint Augustine, and from there, I’ll change trains and tracks—I’ll climb aboard the Sunshine Express, which will take me the rest of the way. It will drop me off right in front of the hotel. Daddy made sure of it before he took me to the station.
Mother refused to come along to see me off. She says I’m making an awful mistake and I’m bound to regret it one of these days. Well, so what if I do? I know for a fact I’d regret staying home forever, never giving Cassadaga a try.
She’s the real reason I need to go, but she doesn’t like it when I point that out. It’s her family with the gift—or the curse, as she’d rather call it. She’d prefer to hide behind her Bible and pretend it’s just some old story we use to scare ourselves on Halloween, but I wrote to the library in Marblehead, and a man there wrote me back with the truth. No witches were ever staked and torched in Salem—most of them were hanged instead—but my aunts in the town next door were not so lucky.
The Dartle women have always taken refuge by the water, and they have always burned anyway.
Supposedly, that’s why my family left Germany ages ago—and why they moved from town to town, to rural middles of nowhere for so long: They were fleeing the pitchforks and torches. How we eventually ended up in Norfolk, I don’t know. You’d think my ancestors might have had the good sense to run farther away from people who worried about witches, but that was where they finally stopped, right on the coast, where a few miles north the preachers and judges were still calling for our heads. They were hanging us up by our necks.
Even so, Virginia has been our home for years, but I, for one, can’t stay there. I can’t pretend I’m not different, and our neighbors are getting weird about it.
I bet that when I’m good and gone, my mother will tell everyone I’ve headed down to Chattahoochee for a spell, to clear my head and get right with God. As if that’s what they do to you in those kinds of places.
Mother can tell them whatever she wants. Daddy knows the truth, and he’s wished me well.
Besides, what else should I do? I’ve finished with my schooling, and I’m not interested in marrying Harvey Wheaton, because he says I have too many books. Mother said it was proof enough right there that I was crazy, if I’d turn down a good-looking boy with a fortune and a fondness for a girl with some meat on her bones, but Daddy shrugged and told me there’s a lid for every pot, so if Harvey isn’t mine, I ought to look elsewhere. The world is full of lids.
Harvey did offer me a very pretty ring, though.
I’m not saying I’ve had any second thoughts about telling him no, because I haven’t—but Mother’s right about one thing: All the girls you see in magazines and in the pictures . . . they’re so skinny. All bound-up breasts and knock-knees, with necks like twigs. Those are the kinds of women who marry, she says. Those women are pretty.
Nonsense. I’ve seen plenty of happily married women who are fatter than I am.
So I’m not married. Who cares? I’m pretty, and I’m never hungry. There’s no good reason to starve to fit in your clothes when you can simply ask the seamstress to adjust them. That’s what I say. Still, I do hope Daddy’s right about lids and pots. I’m happy to be on my own for now, but someday I might like a family of my own.
And a husband.
But not Harvey.
If I ever find myself so low that I think of him fondly (apart from that ring; he said it was his grandmother’s), I’ll remind myself how he turned up his nose at my shelves full of dreadfuls and mysteries. Then I’ll feel better about being an old maid, because there are worse things than spinsterhood, I’m quite certain. Old maids don’t have to put up with snotty boys who think they’re special because they can read Latin, as if that’s good for anything these days.
I’m not a spinster yet, no matter what Mother says. I’m twenty-two years old today, and just because she got married at seventeen, there’s no good reason for me to do likewise.
• • •
SHE’S such an incurious woman, I almost feel sorry for her—much as I’m sure she almost feels sorry for me. I wish she wouldn’t bother.
• • •
I have some money, some education, and some very unusual skills—and I intend to learn more about them before I wear anybody’s ring. If nothing else, I need to know how to explain myself. Any true love of mine would have questions. Why do I see other people’s dreams? How do I listen to ghosts? By what means do I know which card will turn up next in a pack—which suit and which number will land faceup upon a table? How do I use those cards to read such precise and peculiar futures? And pasts?
I don’t know, but I am determined to find out.
So now I’m bound for Cassadaga, where there are wonderful esoteric books, or so I’m told. It’s not a big town, but there’s a bookstore. There’s also a hotel and a theater, and I don’t know what else. I’ll have to wait and see.
• • •
I am not good at waiting and seeing.
Patience. That’s one more thing I need to learn. Maybe I’ll acquire some, with the help of these spiritualists . . . these men and women who practice their faith and explore their abilities out in the open as if no one anywhere ever struck a match and watched a witch burn.
• • •
ARE the residents of Cassadaga witches? That’s what they would’ve been called back when my however-many-great-great-aunts Sophia and Mary were killed. So am I a witch? I might as well be, for if I’d been alive in the time of my doomed relations, the puritans at Marblehead would’ve killed me, too.
It’s not my fault I know things. I often wish that I didn’t.
Sometimes—though of course I’d never tell him so—I tire of Daddy thrusting the newspaper before me, asking which stocks will rise or fall in the coming days. It’s ungenerous of me, considering, and I ought to have a better attitude about it. (That’s what my sister says.) My stock suggestions helped my parents purchase our house, and that’s how I came by the money for this trip, too. Daddy could hardly refuse me when I told him I wanted to learn more about how to best make use of my secret but profitable abilities.
I went ahead and let him think I’ll be concentrating on the clairvoyant side of my
talents, for he’s squeamish about the ghosts. Whenever I mention them, he gently changes the subject in favor of something less gruesome and more productive . . . like the stock sheets.
Or once, when I was very small, he brought up the horses at a racetrack. I don’t think he knows I remember, but I do, and vividly: They were great black and brown things, kicking in their stalls, snorting with anticipation or snuffling their faces in canvas feed bags. The barn reeked of manure and hay and the sweaty musk of big animals. It smelled like leather and wood, and soot from the lanterns. It smelled like money.
He asked me which horse would win the next race, and I picked a tea-colored bay. I think she won us some money, but for some reason, Daddy was embarrassed by it. He asked me to keep our little adventure from my mother. He made me promise. I don’t know what he did with our winnings.
We never went to the races again, and more’s the pity. I liked the horses better than I like the stock sheets.
I hear there are horse tracks in Florida, too. Maybe I’ll find one.
• • •
IF there’s any manual or course of instruction for my strange abilities, I hope to find that in Florida, too. I hope I find answers, and I hope to find people who will understand what I’m talking about when I say that I was startled to receive a dream that didn’t belong to me.
So I’ll close this entry in my once rarely used (and now excessively scribbled upon) journal precisely the way I began it—with that poor man, dreaming of fire. That sad soldier, alone in a house with his music, and the ocean air drifting through the windows. He’s bothered by something, or reaching out toward something he doesn’t understand. He’s seeking sympathy or comfort from a world that either can’t hear him or won’t listen.
I hear him. I’ll listen.
Mother says that an unmarried woman over twenty is a useless thing, but I am nowhere near useless, as I’ve proved time and time again—in the stock sheets and (just the once) on the racetracks. Well, I’ll prove it in Cassadaga, too, when I learn how to help the man who dreams of fire.