The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 9

It wasn’t just the look of the room, though that was bad enough. The bed—the one Rebecca had slept in nearly every night of the last twelve years—was a sodden, blackened ruin. Even from the doorway—Rebecca hadn’t yet found the courage to actually go into the room—she could see that the fire must have started in the bed and spread from there. She shuddered as she imagined Andrea falling asleep, a cigarette between her fingers. The cigarette must have dropped onto the coverlet, slowly burned its way through the blankets, sheets, and pad, and eventually burrowed into the mattress itself.
But why hadn’t Andrea awakened? Wouldn’t she have begun choking on the smoke filling the room? Or had she just gone from sleep directly into unconsciousness, utterly oblivious to what was happening to her? She must have, or surely she would have awakened as the fire had spread out from the bed, crawling across the carpet, then climbing up the curtains around the windows. The paint on the window frames was badly charred, and the wallpaper hung in scorched shreds. Everything in the room would have to go, and the paper and paint peeled down to the bare wood.
It was the smell that truly made Rebecca shiver. The terrible smell that was nothing like the friendly odor of a fire burning on a hearth. This was an odor she would never forget. From the moment she and her aunt had come back into the house, it filled her nostrils, every breath bringing back the memory of awakening in the middle of the night and realizing that the house was on fire.
Though Martha Ward objected, Rebecca had gone through every room of the house save the chapel, opening the windows as wide as she could and propping open all the doors to prevent any of them from blowing shut and cutting off the breeze. The cold air was eliminating at least the worst of the acrid smell. She’d stripped her bed, and her aunt’s too, and put the linens into the big washing machine down in the basement, but even as she began the first batch of laundry, she’d known that it was going to be endless. Every piece of clothing would have to be washed, every stick of furniture cleaned. Every rug would have to be taken to the cleaners. Even then, she was certain the smell would remain, which meant that every time she entered the house, the whole terrifying scene from last night would come back to her like a nightmare from which she would never escape.
She was still standing at the door to Andrea’s room, willing herself to go in, when she heard her aunt calling to her from downstairs: “Rebecca? Rebecca! This house won’t get clean by itself.”
Rebecca was about to turn away from the door to Andrea’s room when something caught her eye.
Something that glittered in odd contrast to the charred blackness of the room.
Something that was almost hidden beneath the bed.
Even as she went into the room to pick the object up, she knew what it was.
The cigarette lighter she’d given Andrea the day before yesterday, in the shape of a dragon’s head.
Wiping away the worst of the soot, she turned the shining object over in her hands. The dragon’s red eyes glared up at her, and though there were still some smudges of soot on the creature’s golden scales, it seemed undamaged by the fire.
When she pressed the trigger in its neck, a tongue of flame immediately appeared.
“Rebecca? Rebecca! I am waiting for you!”
Her aunt’s commanding voice startled her, and Rebecca scurried out of the ruined room and down the stairs. Martha was waiting in the foyer, a bucket of soapy water at her feet. She handed Rebecca a rag. “Start here. I shall start in the kitchen.”
Rebecca glanced at the soot-stained paper on the walls. “It will ruin the paper, Aunt Martha.”
“The paper will not be ruined,” Martha pronounced. “The Lord will cleanse our house as surely as He punished Andrea for her sins.” Then her eyes fell on the object in Rebecca’s hand. “What is that?” she demanded.
Rebecca’s first impulse was to slip the dragon into her pocket, to keep it out of her aunt’s sight, but she knew it was already too late. Reluctantly, she placed the golden dragon in her aunt’s hand. “It’s just a cigarette lighter,” she said softly. “I gave it to Andrea on Sunday, when she came back.”
Martha Ward held the lighter up, turning it and examining it from every angle. “Where did this come from?” she asked, her eyes still fixed on the dragon.
“The flea market,” Rebecca replied. “Oliver and I found it, and—”
“Oliver?” Martha cut in. “Oliver Metcalf?”
Rebecca shrank back from the opprobrium in her aunt’s voice. “Oliver is my friend,” she said, but the words were uttered so quietly they were almost inaudible.
“I might have expected Oliver Metcalf to find something like this,” Martha said, her fingers tightening around the dragon for a moment before she deposited it in the pocket of her apron. “I shall dispose of this.”
“But it’s not yours, Aunt Martha. I gave it to Andrea, and—” Her voice broke. “And I’d just—well, I’d just like to keep it.”
Martha Ward’s expression hardened into the same dark mask of condemnation that had appeared on her face at dinner the evening before, when Andrea told her what she’d done in Boston. “It is a graven image, and a tool of the Devil,” she pronounced. “I shall decide how best to dispose of it.”
She turned away and disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen.
Rebecca dipped the rag into the bucket of soapy water, wrung it out, and began wiping the layer of soot from the woodwork around the front door. But even as she worked she knew it was useless. No matter how long they might scrub, the terrible stench of the fire would never be removed from the house.
But her aunt, she also knew, would never let her stop trying.