The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 9

For a second Ed Becker didn’t know where he was. His mind still half entangled in the nightmare, he tried to twist away from the clawlike grasp of the dream. The terrible vision remained before him; he could still hear his own howling scream. Beside him, though, Bonnie slept quietly. As he sat up, willing his heartbeat to slow, his thoughts to focus, she sighed and snuggled deeper into the quilt, but did not wake.
Imagination. These hideous images were merely the product of mental stress—the culmination of months of anxiety over the awful tragedies among his friends, his worries over the fate of the Blackstone Center, capped by the close call they’d had tonight.
Imagination—overwrought and out of control.
Ed got out of bed and went to the window, where he could just make out the silhouette of his house against the starlit darkness of the sky. “It really was just a dream,” he said quietly, repeating his wife’s comforting words to himself like a mantra. A dream. Just a dream.
But he knew he didn’t believe it.
Knew he had to see for himself.
Even as he opened the front door, he could sense that something had changed.
Everything about the house was different.
The way it smelled.
The way it felt.
He reached for the light switch, remembering the power had been turned off only when there was no response to his touch. Making his way through the foyer, he came to the dining room door. Though it was almost pitch-black, he could see the vague outline of a table and chairs.
Big, heavy furniture, unlike the teak set he and Bonnie had brought with them from Boston.
An illusion!
It had to be an illusion, born of the darkness and the memory of the dream. But then, as he remembered the vision of his clients’ severed heads displayed on the table, he backed away from the dining room. Crossing the threshold into the living room, he stopped.
The room was not empty.
He could feel the presence of someone—or something—waiting in the space that yawned before him. As in the dream, he tried to turn away and leave the house.
But also as in the dream, his body refused to respond to the desires of his mind, and he found himself drawn inexorably into the room and the blackness beyond.
And then he knew.
They were everywhere. They sat in every Victorian chair, perched on every footstool, and leaned against every gateleg table and curio cabinet.
Two of them flanked the fireplace.
He could see at once that they were all dead. Pale, motionless, they somehow managed to stare at him accusingly with their sightless eyes.
Then, the wail. A low keening that slowly built into a cacophony of pain and suffering.
Ed recognized them all, for during the last fifteen years, he had studied photographs of every one of them. They were the victims of his clients, now gathered in his home, come at last to settle their accounts with the man who had defended their killers.
His heart pounding, Ed turned away and lurched toward the front door, only to find himself staring into the empty eyes of his long-dead great-uncle Paul Becker.
“They come for us,” he heard his great-uncle say, though his colorless lips stayed utterly still. “The people we kill. They come for us every night. Now they’ve come for you too.”
A moan escaping his lips, Ed turned and shambled up the stairs. His heart was beating so wildly he felt as if his chest might explode. At the top of the stairs he stopped, his eyes darting around the hall, searching for someplace to hide.
As the sky outside continued to brighten, and the silvery dawn began to seep through the stairwell’s windows, one by one the doors to each of the bedrooms opened.
In silent ranks the victims appeared and came slowly toward him, reaching out to him just as his own specter had reached out to him in the dream.
Instinctively taking a step back, Ed lost his footing. For a moment he teetered on the top step, but then fell backward, a single panicked scream bursting from his throat before his head struck the bare hardwood treads, cutting off his shout.
Rolling over and over, Ed Becker tumbled to the foot of the stairs, to sprawl in a broken heap on the floor of the foyer.
Bonnie Becker raced across the lawn and up onto the porch of their house, throwing the door open so hard that the glass panel in its center cracked. For a split second she saw nothing in the faint light, then caught sight of her husband’s body lying at the foot of the stairs. “Ed!” she screamed. “Oh my God! Ed!” Dropping to her knees, she was about to gather him into her arms when she saw the strange angle at which his head lay, and knew his neck was broken.
Don’t touch him! she told herself. Don’t touch him. Just call for help.
Her entire body shaking, she managed to get to her feet and stumble to the phone.
Picking up the receiver, she jabbed at the keypad, her hand trembling so badly she couldn’t even be certain she had punched the right buttons. But on the second ring the 911 operator answered. Moments later, as she heard the sound of sirens screaming toward her house for the second time that night, Bonnie gazed numbly around the room.
It was exactly as they had left it.
Nothing had changed; nothing was different.
Yet as Bonnie went back into the foyer to watch over her husband until the ambulance came, she knew that despite her own words to the contrary, somehow—in some way she was certain she would never understand—another of Ed’s nightmares had come true.