The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 7

Ed Becker gazed dolefully at the glowing digits on the clock next to his bed. The last time he looked they had read 1:14 A.M. Now, unbelievably, they read 1:23 A.M. How could only nine minutes have passed in what had seemed to Ed like at least an hour? Yet the colon was flashing steadily, once a second, just as it always did.
Bonnie was sleeping peacefully beside him, not even making a movement or emitting a sound he could blame for his own sleeplessness, so he didn’t have a decent excuse to wake her up. Finally giving up altogether on the idea of sleeping, he slid out of bed, pulled on his robe, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he fished around in the refrigerator until he found a package of sliced ham, some turkey, and a loaf of bread. Five minutes later he carried his sandwich, along with a glass of milk, into the living room. Switching on the television set, he turned the volume down low enough so as not to disturb his wife and daughter, then restlessly switched it off again and picked up the latest issue of the Blackstone Chronicle, a special edition Oliver had hastily put out, most of it taken up with news of the death of Germaine Wagner and the disappearance of Rebecca Morrison. Though he’d elected to keep his own counsel, Ed privately agreed with those who suspected that Rebecca might have had more to do with Germaine’s death than Steve Driver was currently thinking. It had been Ed’s experience—and he would be the first to admit that his own experiences didn’t make him the most objective of observers—that often it was exactly the kind of sweet, quiet woman, such as Rebecca appeared to be, who secretly harbored an anger that could explode into violence like the carnage that had swept through the Wagner house.
Oliver Metcalf, though, had carefully slanted the story to be so sympathetic toward Rebecca that she sounded like a saint.
Ed Becker didn’t believe in saints.
On the other hand, it was exactly the kind of thinking he was indulging in right now—the assumption that not only did evil lurk within even the most innocent-appearing souls, but it would inevitably manifest itself in murder—that had finally led him to give up his practice and leave the darker side of Boston behind. So maybe Rebecca was every bit as innocent as Oliver presented her.
Putting the paper aside, he swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and, rising, carried the plate and glass back to the kitchen. He was about to switch off the light when he suddenly caught a whiff of something.
Gas!
Moving to the stove, he checked to make sure all the valves were tightly closed.
Every one of them was shut. The pilot light burned steadily blue.
Frowning, Ed glanced around the kitchen, then moved toward the door to the basement stairs. Instinctively reaching for the light switch as he opened the door, he reeled back as fumes surged out of the basement, nearly choking him. He slammed the door closed again, then broke out in a cold sweat as he realized what could have happened if he’d actually turned the light on. Any spark from the switch might cause the gas to explode. Then, as he remembered there was a freezer in the basement—a freezer that switched on and off automatically several times every day and night—his heart began to pound.
Out!
He had to get Bonnie and Amy out, right now!
Racing out of the kitchen, he bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Bonnie!” Shouting his wife’s name again, he slammed open the door to their bedroom. “Get out!” he yelled. “Quick!”
Jerking awake, Bonnie sat up in bed. “Ed? What—”
“Don’t talk! Don’t ask questions. Just get out of the house! I’ll get Amy!” As Bonnie finally started to get out of bed, Ed ran down the hall to his daughter’s room, throwing its door open with enough violence that he heard the plaster behind it crack and fall to the floor as the knob struck it. Amy, already sitting up, was rubbing her eyes as Ed reached down and scooped her out of bed, snagging the blanket that had been covering her as well. “Come on, honey,” he said. “I have to get you out of here.”
Amy, still half asleep, tried to wriggle free. “No!” she wailed. “It’s still night! I don’t want to get up!”
Ignoring his daughter’s words but tightening his grip on her, Ed dashed out of the room, coming to the head of the stairs just as Bonnie, now clad in a robe and slippers, was emerging from the master bedroom.
“What is it?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Gas!” Ed shouted as he started down the stairs. “The whole basement’s full of it!”
A moment later he was fumbling with the chain on the front door, but Bonnie darted in front of him, her nimble fingers instantly freeing it from its catch. Then they were out of the house and hurrying across the front lawn. Only when they were on the sidewalk did Ed finally stop and lower Amy to the ground.
“Gas?” Bonnie repeated. “What are you talking about? How did you—”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Ed told her. “So I went down and made myself a sandwich, and while I was cleaning up, I smelled it. I thought it was the stove, but—”
The blast cut off his words in midsentence, and he instinctively reached down and pulled Amy back into his arms as shards of glass exploded from the small light wells that served as the basement’s two windows, and the long-unused access door to the coal bin blew off its hinges, allowing an enormous ball of fire to boil out of the cellar and roll across the driveway.
Shrieking, Amy wrapped her arms around her father, and buried her face in his shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Ed whispered into his daughter’s ear. “It’s going to be all right.”
But in his head he was hearing the sound of the explosion over and over again.
It sounded exactly like the blast of the gun that Paul Becker had fired at him in his dream.
Rebecca wasn’t sure what had awakened her; indeed, it was only the slow process of coming back to consciousness that told her she’d been asleep at all.
She wasn’t afraid anymore—at least not in any way she’d been familiar with before being brought to the place that had become her dark, cold world. The things that had once frightened her—the unidentifiable sounds of the night, which only a few days ago would send goose bumps racing up her spine, or the imagined presences that might be lurking in the shadows on the evenings she walked home alone from the library—now seemed like old friends whose reappearance would bring her comfort in the total isolation into which she’d fallen.
Crazy, she thought. I must be going crazy.
She had lost all sense of time; had no feeling either of night and day, or of how long she’d been in the featureless room. In the muddle of her mind, there was no longer any difference between minutes and hours, hours and days, days and weeks.
Her wrists and ankles were still bound, but now she was blindfolded, and it felt as if her eyes were covered with the same kind of heavy duct tape that sealed her lips. She was certain she knew why the blindfold had been added: so her captor could see without being seen.
Now, as she came out of the restless sleep she’d fallen into minutes—or perhaps hours—ago, she tried to fathom what it was that had brought her awake.
A sound?
But there were no sounds; the tiny chamber that was her prison was as eerily silent as the palaces of death built for the pharaohs.
Yet she was filled with foreboding, sensing that if she held perfectly still, if she held her breath so that not even her lungs would disturb the quiet in the room, she would hear something.
She waited.
And then she heard it: the scraping of a key being fitted into a lock, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown. The door itself made no sound, but Rebecca, deprived of any visual stimulus, had grown sensitive to other things, and the slight change in the air currents as the door swung open felt like wind against her cheek.
And she could feel that she was no longer alone.
Still, she waited, and though she could hear nothing, she began to sense that whatever had entered the room was behind her now.
She felt a touch against her cheek, a touch so light she could almost imagine it wasn’t there at all.
Then there was a quick movement, and she felt a slash of pain across her mouth. For a moment it was as if her skin were torn away, but then she realized it was only the duct tape that had been ripped off. A tiny moan escaped her lips. Instantly, a hand clamped over her mouth, silencing her.
The hand lingered, its pressure only slowly lightening, but Rebecca made no move, and finally it dropped away. A second after that she felt something touch her lips, and then realized she was being offered water.
Greedily, she sucked it up, swallowing every drop she was allowed.
A moment later the tape was once more pressed in place, but again the fingers lingered on her skin, and now Rebecca could feel the cold smoothness of the latex that covered them.
She held perfectly still, refusing to acknowledge the touch with any reaction. Finally, one of the fingers moved.
Involuntarily, Rebecca shuddered as the finger crept across her throat like the point of a knife.…
Ed Becker stared mutely at his house. Beside him, Bonnie was as silent as he, though their neighbors—who had appeared on the sidewalk before the first fire truck had arrived—seemed to all be talking at once. “What happened?” Ed heard someone say.
“An explosion,” someone else replied.
“I saw a flash,” a third voice said. “Helluva thing—lit up our whole bedroom. Scared Myra half to death!”
“Oh, it did not,” a woman’s outraged voice protested. “You were more scared than I was!”
“So if there was an explosion and a flash, where’s the fire?” the first voice demanded.
And that was the eerie thing. There was simply no fire.
From the moment the gas had exploded in the basement, Ed had waited for his house to burst into flames, certain that by the time the first fire truck arrived, the building would have become an inferno like the one that destroyed Martha Ward’s house only a few weeks ago. But as the sound of the sirens grew louder and louder, and not just one, but three fire trucks converged on Amherst Street, the house remained silent and dark, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened. As the fire trucks braked to a stop, their sirens were abruptly cut off, then three crews began pulling hoses from the reels on the trucks. Larry Schulze pulled up in the white Chevy Blazer that served as his chief’s car and hurried over to Ed.
“What happened? Where’d it start?”
“It was gas,” Ed explained. “I smelled it coming out of the basement, and got Bonnie and Amy out just before it blew. But I don’t get it—how come the house isn’t burning?”
“You mean ‘how come it isn’t burning yet,’” the fire chief corrected him. “Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not on fire.” Dispatching one man to shut the gas off at the main, he beckoned to two others to follow him as he started down the driveway.
“I’m coming with you,” Ed said.
The fire chief turned back, his stony expression clear even in the shadowy light of the street lamps. “No you’re not,” he declared in a voice that carried every bit as much authority as any judge Ed had ever dealt with in a courtroom. “You’re going to stay right here until I’ve gone around the house and then gone through it. When I’m satisfied there’s no fire and that it’s safe, then you can go in.”
As Ed was considering the merits of trying to argue with the chief, Bonnie laid her hand on her husband’s arm. “Let him do his job, Ed,” she said. “Please?”
Ed nodded his thanks to Bonnie as Schulze and his men set off. In less than ten minutes they had circled the exterior and were back in front of the house. “So far it looks okay,” the chief called as he mounted the steps to the front door, which was standing wide open. “Is the gas off?”
“Thirty seconds after you asked!” one of his men shouted back.
“Okay! We’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”
The crowd waited, finally falling silent as the fire chief inspected the house. When he emerged a few minutes later appearing just as calm as when he’d gone in, an audible murmur of relief rippled through the bystanders, except for two small boys who sounded sorely disappointed that they weren’t going to see the firemen use their hoses.
“You got lucky,” Schulze told Ed Becker as his men began rewinding their unused hoses onto the reels. “If you’d had the kind of trash in your basement most people do, you could have lost the whole house.”
Bonnie Becker stared at the fire chief in disbelief. “You mean it’s all right? It’s not on fire?”
“That happens sometimes,” Schulze explained. “You have to understand what goes on with gas. When it lights off, which probably happened when the freezer kicked on, it goes so fast that unless there’s something in the immediate vicinity that’s pretty flammable, it literally blows itself out. You lose all the windows, and the doors too, but that’s about it. You can take a look now, if you want. But I’ll go with you.”
Ed gazed at the house, remembering just how close he’d come to dying that night. If the gas had exploded as he’d opened the basement door—
He cut the thought short, trying to shut out the image that rose in his mind of a boiling mass of fire erupting around him, snuffing his life out in an instant, or leaving him so badly burned he would have prayed to die rather than suffer the pain the flames would have inflicted.
Though he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to him, he knew he had to go back into the house.
Into the basement, where the explosion had occurred.
With Larry Schulze following close behind him, Ed started toward the front door. “Is it okay to switch on the lights?” he asked as they stepped into the foyer.
“Can’t. I shut off the power, just in case. Use this.”
Turning on the flashlight Schulze handed him, Ed moved cautiously through the foyer, shining the beam into every corner, barely able to believe the house had suffered no serious damage. But it seemed to be true—everything looked normal; nothing seemed even to have been disturbed. But as he entered the kitchen, he stopped short. “Jesus,” he said, staring at the door to the basement.
Or, more accurately, what had been the door to the basement. It now was a heap of shattered lumber so torn by the explosion that it was barely recognizable as having been a door at all. All that remained within the frame were a couple of fragments of wood clinging to the hinges that had been half torn from the frame itself. “That’s where I was standing not more than a minute before it blew,” Ed said, his voice barely above a whisper as the unbidden vision of the exploding fireball rose in his mind once more. Stepping over the shredded wood that had been the door, he gazed down the stairs.
Oddly, the basement looked normal too. It wasn’t until he’d started down the stairs that he realized he’d been expecting everything to be blackened. But apparently it had happened so fast that not even any charring had occurred.
As he came to the bottom of the stairs, he shined the light around and stopped short.
Blood!
There was blood everywhere!
His gorge rising, Ed braced himself against the wall as his knees threatened to buckle beneath him.
The blood was smeared on the walls, puddled on the floor, dripping from the beams overhead. But it was impossible! When the gas exploded, there had been no one down here!
Besides, the blood he’d seen before had existed only in a dream. Yet here it was.
First the explosion, sounding exactly like the shotgun Paul Becker had been aiming at him.
And now the blood.
The blood of the people his clients had murdered splashed through his basement as if in retribution for his having defended the undefendable.
But it was impossible! It hadn’t happened! It was only a dream!
“Ed?” Larry Schulze was gripping his shoulder. “Ed, are you okay? I know the paint’s a mess but—”
Paint?
Paint!
Or course! Not blood at all! Paint!
Though the fire chief was still talking, Ed Becker no longer heard his words. The strength finally coming back into his legs, he moved deeper into the basement.
As he looked around, using the flashlight to explore every corner, the same feeling of horror that had come over him when Riley died that morning crept up on him once again.
Though it hadn’t been the roar of a shotgun, the explosion of the gas had sounded exactly like one.
And though the red stains on the walls and the floor and even the ceiling weren’t blood, they looked no different from the terrifying crimson vision he’d witnessed in his dream.
It had happened again.
For the second time, his nightmare had come true.