The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 6

A silence hung over the Becker house, but it wasn’t the kind of comfortable silence that often settles over dwellings whose occupants are happy and content with each other. This was a tense silence, the kind of quiet in which people wait nervously, knowing something is going to happen, but not knowing what.
Bonnie had finally succeeded in putting Amy to bed, though the little girl had insisted that without her dog there was no possibility at all that she would go to sleep. She refused even to say good night to her father, to whom she hadn’t spoken all day. Bonnie had sat with her for almost an hour, though, and finally Amy drifted into a fitful sleep.
When Bonnie came downstairs, she found Ed sprawled on the sofa in the living room, his feet propped up on the coffee table. Though his eyes were fixed on the television, she was sure he saw nothing of the flickering image on the screen. Sitting down beside him, she took his hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said quietly. “And I know it doesn’t seem like it tonight, but Amy will get over it. And we’ll get her another dog.”
At first Bonnie wasn’t sure if her husband had heard her, but finally he returned her squeeze. “I know.” He sighed. “What’s really freaking me is that I dreamed the whole thing last night before it happened.”
Bonnie shook her head. “C’mon, Ed. It wasn’t the same as your dream. The circumstances were completely different.”
For the first time since that morning, Ed managed a smile, though it was little more than a wry grimace. “Now you’re starting to sound like me in a courtroom,” he told her. “I always could split enough hairs to get the worst kind of sleazebags off hooks they should have been left dangling from.”
“It was your job,” Bonnie replied, though without an enormous amount of conviction. While she loved everything about her husband, even after having been married to him for nearly ten years, there were still some things she didn’t understand, not the least of which was Ed’s insistence that everyone, no matter how heinous his crimes might be, deserved the best defense that could be presented. The prosecution will always twist things against the defendant. He’d told her this so many times, the words were permanently etched in her memory. It’s my job to twist them the other way, so that in the end the jury has a shot at coming to a fair verdict The problem for Bonnie had always been that Ed was so good at twisting the facts, he often was able to get acquittals for people both of them knew were guilty. The final straw was a case that left such a bad taste in both their mouths that Ed had finally decided to give up his criminal practice in Boston and come back to Blackstone and a very quiet civil career. It was a capital case in which he’d won acquittal for a defendant accused of killing three children. Ed had convinced the jury that the police had somehow framed the man. The day after the acquittal, Ed’s last criminal client had gone out and killed a fourth child.
“And I was good at my job,” Ed said now. “Too good, as we both well know. But the plain fact is that last night I dreamed I killed Riley, and this morning I did it. You can’t change the facts.”
“Dreams don’t involve facts,” Bonnie insisted. “They aren’t anything more than your subconscious taking out the garbage after you’ve gone to bed.”
“Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit here and argue about it with you all night,” Bonnie told him. “In fact, I think I’ll go to bed. Want to come with me?”
Ed shook his head. “I’m going to stay up for a little while,” he said. “Maybe I’ll even go down and work on the dresser for a couple of hours.”
Bonnie leaned over and kissed him. “Suit yourself. But whatever you do, don’t keep on brooding. Things are going to be fine.”
After Bonnie was gone, Ed reached for the remote control, intending to turn off the television set, when he saw the old stereoscope they’d found in the dresser, along with the collection of pictures, sitting on the coffee table. Ignoring the television, he picked up the stereoscope and pictures, then stretched out on his back on the sofa so the light of the table lamp would fall fully on the faded images printed on the cards. Dropping the first one into the rack, he twisted the knob until the scene came into focus.
It was the room that was Amy’s now, though in the picture it looked little like the room in which his daughter was currently sleeping. Nor did it look anything like he remembered it from when he himself had been a boy and his grandparents had still lived in this house.
Yet there was something familiar about it, something that made him feel as if somewhere deep inside him, there was a memory of the room as it was in the picture, rather than as it was now. He studied the picture for several minutes, then put in another.
Again he had the sense that there was a memory lurking just beyond the fringes of his consciousness, but again he couldn’t quite grasp it, couldn’t quite pull it into a bright enough light to examine it.
One by one, Ed examined all the pictures, finally returning to a scene of the room he was in—the living room. It too held that vague feeling of déjà vu, though at least in that picture he was able to identify the source of the eerie feeling: two of the pieces of furniture—an ornate Victorian sofa and a large Queen Anne chair—had been in this room when he was a little boy.
Ed was still gazing at the picture when he slowly drifted into sleep.
He was back in the basement, working on the dresser.
Opening a drawer, he found a stereoscope, exactly like the one upstairs. There was a card in its rack, and Ed picked up the instrument and peered through its lenses.
This time he was staring not at a familiar room but at a scene in which a man was crouching over a woman almost as if he were about to make love to her. But there was a knife in the man’s hand, and as Ed stared at it, its blade turned red. Then he saw that the woman’s chest was oozing blood from at least a dozen wounds.
Suddenly, the man’s face came into focus, and Ed recognized it as the face of a man he had defended a decade earlier.
A man who had stabbed his wife a dozen times, then left her—still conscious—to bleed to death.
Shuddering at the image, he dropped the stereoscope back into the drawer and slammed it shut, but when he pulled another drawer open, he found another stereoscope. This time he hesitated before picking up the instrument, but although he willed himself to resist, his hands seemed to close on it of their own volition. The image this time was of a fast-food restaurant. He felt a momentary sense of relief as he gazed at the scene of families seated at tables, munching on hamburgers and french fries. But then—like the image he’d gazed at before—it began to change, the happy faces on the children transformed into masks of terror, the black-and-white image horrifyingly reversed to its negative. A blinding flash, and then the floor was writhing with a tangle of bodies, and now crimson blood spouted from arms, legs, torsos. The blood of the innocent.
Ed had defended the man who had abruptly appeared in the doorway of that restaurant six years ago, carrying an automatic rifle with which he’d killed a dozen people in less than ten seconds, and maimed two dozen more. Within the privilege of their relationship, the man had calmly and with no remorse told Ed that he’d done it simply because “there were too damned many people in the place, and I was sick of seeing them.” Not guilty by reason of insanity. His stomach knotting, Ed slammed the second drawer closed. He wanted to get up and walk away from the dresser, but it wasn’t possible—something inside him compelled him to keep opening the drawers, keep pulling out the stereoscopes, keep viewing the atrocities his clients had committed.
The drawers seemed to go on forever, but finally he closed the last one. Having witnessed the final grisly scene, and looked once more upon the guilty face of another man he’d extracted from the jaws of justice, he at last was able to turn away from the dresser.
And found himself facing the same man he’d been defending in his dream the night before.
His great-uncle stared at him through the eyes of a madman; in his hands he cradled a double-barreled shotgun. Raising the gun, Paul Becker pointed it directly at him. “You got them off,” he said. “You got every one of them off! Every one of them except me!”
As if in slow motion, Ed watched Paul Becker fire the gun. An explosive roar filled the basement, and suddenly there was blood everywhere. Ed could feel it, feel its hot stickiness as it oozed from the gaping wound the shotgun had torn in his belly, feel it running down his body to puddle at his feet. Somehow it had already flowed across the basement. It was smeared across the floor; it was flowing from the beams overhead. Every surface was dripping with it.
His blood. And the blood of every victim of every murderer he’d ever defended.
Now Great-uncle Paul was raising the gun a second time, aiming it at him, but this time Ed raised his hands, crying out, “No! I’m sorry! Oh, God, I’m sorry!”
It was the sound of his own voice that tore Ed Becker from the grasp of the nightmare. As he jerked upright on the sofa, the stereoscope tumbled to the floor.
He stared at it for a long moment, then reached down and picked it up. The card he’d placed in its rack before falling asleep was still there, and he started to raise the instrument to his eyes for one last look. But as the images he’d seen in the dream suddenly flooded back to him, blood-soaked and horrifying, he abruptly changed his mind.
Leaving the stereoscope on the coffee table, he went upstairs to bed.
But the dream still haunted him, and sleep refused to come.
Go to bed, Oliver Metcalf told himself. Just go to bed and forget about what Uncle Harvey said. But even as he silently repeated the words to himself for what must have been the twentieth time, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to obey his own command. All day long he’d been trying to get his uncle’s words out of his head, and all day long he’d failed.
Your fault … it was your fault.
But how could it have been his fault? He’d been only four years old. How could he have done something that killed his sister? “All your father ever said was that somehow the two of you had gotten hold of a knife of some kind.” He paused, as if searching his memory. “You were playing with it. One of you must have tripped, and the blade …” Harvey Connally’s voice had faded into silence for a moment, but then he’d made himself finish telling his nephew the little he knew. “The blade went into your sister’s neck,” he said. “Apparently you were so frightened, you ran away and hid the knife.”
All day, Oliver had listened to his uncle’s words replay in his mind, and slowly he began to understand what had happened to him. The gaps in his memory suddenly made sense—even now, so many years later, the mental image he conjured up of two small children playing with a dangerous instrument made him shudder, and when he tried to imagine the knife plunging into his sister’s neck, the horror of the image was so great, he was unable to complete it even in his imagination.
What must it have been like when he’d been only four years old?
No wonder he’d blotted it out, hiding it from himself as thoroughly as he’d managed to hide the weapon from his father, and everyone else who’d searched for it.
No wonder people had looked at him so strangely all his life. Although his uncle insisted that Malcolm Metcalf never told anyone else what had happened, and Mallory’s death had been officially deemed accidental, there would have been as many rumors about his sister as there now were about what had really taken place in the Wagners’ house.
As had happened so often over the days since she’d disappeared, an image of Rebecca rose in Oliver’s mind. Since her mysterious disappearance, he’d felt an emptiness inside him, a hole at his very core that grew larger with each passing day. His frustration had grown too, as he’d realized there was nothing—nothing at all—he could do to help her.
But of one thing he’d become absolutely certain: when Rebecca was found—and he wouldn’t let himself even think of the possibility that she might not be found—he would ask her to marry him.
But now, as his uncle’s words echoed in his mind, he knew that when Rebecca returned, he couldn’t ask her to marry him. Not until he’d banished the demons—the demons that brought the blinding headaches and the terrifying blank spots in his memory. This morning he had at last found the source of those demons.
And the reason he had not been able to make himself go to bed tonight was clear: he knew that the time had finally come to face the demons, and vanquish them.
Sometime during the day it had come to him, a slow and dawning realization of the reason he could not bring himself to enter the Asylum: the certainty that the “accident,” the terrible thing that had happened to Mallory, must have taken place within those dark stone walls. From the moment he realized this, he knew that until he walked through those great oaken doors, he would not sleep. Yet as the afternoon had passed and daylight gave way to darkness, the courage of the sun had yielded to the shadowy terrors the moon brings with it. Now, as the clock downstairs struck midnight, Oliver knew he could put it off no longer.
He must enter the Asylum tonight or forever abandon hope of destroying the demons that haunted him.
Forever give up the hope of Rebecca.
Pulling on a jacket, he took his flashlight from its charger, checked to be sure the beam was at its brightest, then removed the key to the Asylum’s door from the hook next to his own. Even then he hesitated, but finally pulled his front door open and gazed up at the shadowed building looming atop the hill, fifty yards away.
Dark, silent, it stood against the night sky like some great brooding monster, quiescent now, but ready to come to furious life the instant it sensed an unwelcome presence. Oliver started up the path, moving carefully, stepping lightly, as if the mere sound of his feet crunching on the gravel might be enough to bring forth whatever evil lurked within the blackened stone walls.
At the foot of the steps leading to the heavy double doors, he hesitated again. Already a headache was stalking the fringes of his consciousness. As he mounted the steps and inserted the key into the lock, the first waves of pain washed over him. Steeling himself, Oliver drove the pain back into the dark hole from which it had crept, pushed the heavy oak panel open, and stepped inside.
Turning on the flashlight, he played its beam over the shadowed interior.
Where? Where should he go?
But even as the questions formed in his mind, some long-buried memory seeping out from his subconscious guided him through the warren of offices until he stopped in front of a door.
It seemed no different from any of the others, yet behind this door, he knew, were the rooms that had been his father’s office. His hand trembling, Oliver reached out, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.
Still outside the threshold, he let the flashlight’s beam inch through the room, searching every corner it could reach for whatever dark menaces might be lurking in wait.
But the room was empty.
His heart pounding and his right temple dully throbbing, Oliver forced himself to step through the doorway, expectant, unconsciously holding his breath.
There was nothing.
No sound. No sense of an unseen presence.
Only three bare walls, long stripped of the pictures that had once adorned them, and a fourth wall, lined with empty bookshelves.
He had no real memory of this space at all, yet still felt as though the room should be bigger than it was. But of course the last time he would have been in this room he had still been a little boy and it would have seemed huge.
Now it seemed small, and cramped, and dingy.
Crossing to a door that led to an adjoining room, Oliver paused, searching his memory for a clue as to what might lie beyond, but there was none. At last he grasped the knob and turned it, pulling the door open.
The flashlight revealed a bathroom.
A large tiled bathroom, still equipped with an old-fashioned, claw-footed bathtub, a toilet with a flushing tank pinned high on the wall—its pull chain long since disappeared—and a pedestal sink standing below an old-fashioned medicine cabinet with a mirrored door.
Oliver played the light into every corner of the room, but once again found nothing even slightly threatening. It was just as barren and grubby as the office next door. But then, as he was turning back toward the door, the beam of the flashlight struck the mirror above the sink. Through the layer of grime that had built up over the years, Oliver caught a quick glimpse of the bathtub.
Now, in the reflected glow of the beam, it was no longer empty.
Two figures, their eyes glimmering in the light, peered back at him.
Stunned, Oliver whirled around to bathe the figures in the flashlight’s brilliant beam, but even as he turned, an explosion of pain erupted in his head. He staggered, reached for the sink as he fell to his knees, then slumped to the floor. The flashlight, released from his grip, clattered on the tiles and blinked out, and the room dropped into a blackness as dark as the unconsciousness into which the agonizing pain had driven Oliver Metcalf.
The Asylum was once again as still as death.