The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 2

It was a glorious spring morning. Under normal circumstances, Oliver Metcalf would have been humming to himself as he fixed his first cup of coffee, glanced through the Manchester Guardian, then set off for the office, savoring every breath of the sweet air. A day when he might have paused to watch the baby robins tumbling across the lawn in front of Bill McGuire’s house as their parents hopped anxiously around, cheeping their encouragement while the chicks struggled through their first clumsy flight lessons. A day when he would have dawdled at the Red Hen over an extra cup of coffee before heading to the Chronicle office; a sunshiny, optimistic morning that might have induced him to wonder if this would be the day that Rebecca Morrison agreed to let him take her out to dinner.
On a day like today he might even have planned a run down to Boston. But this morning, as on every morning since Rebecca disappeared, Oliver was barely aware of the fresh April breeze or the new buds on the venerable elms outside his kitchen window. From the moment he’d awakened from a restless sleep that had been disturbed by nightmares he couldn’t quite remember—vaguely horrible dreams he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember—dire thoughts of what might have happened to Rebecca were already churning through his mind. He was still trying to hold to the hope that Germaine Wagner’s terrible accident had upset Rebecca so much that she’d simply fled from it. But as the days dragged by, and his heart had filled with expectation every time the phone rang, only to deflate with disappointment when it was not Rebecca’s voice each time he picked it up, it was becoming harder and harder to cling to the faith that Rebecca would return to Blackstone—and to him—unharmed.
Surely, if she was all right, she would have called him. Unless what she’d witnessed in the Wagners’ house had been so horrifying that she simply blocked it, and everything else, out of her memory. Except that Oliver knew just how rare amnesia really was—far more common, in fact, in romance novels and cheap thrillers than it was in real life. Unable to fly directly in the face of logic, he had finally admitted to himself that she must be in danger, perhaps deadly danger. That thought led directly to a depression into which he was sinking deeper every day. Although with every dawn that had broken since her disappearance, Oliver told himself that today he would at last hear from her, the self-assurances had long since begun to ring hollow.
Still, he was resolutely unwilling to grant any credibility to the people who thought Rebecca had finally turned on Germaine. Like everyone in town, Oliver was aware of how badly Germaine Wagner had treated Rebecca. But deep in his heart he was certain that Rebecca was incapable of violence. No, it would have been much more like Rebecca to pity Germaine for the woman’s unhappiness than to turn on her for her meanness of spirit.
All that was left, then, was that something terrible had befallen Rebecca. That thought—and his inability to do anything to help her—now weighed so heavily on Oliver that he was finding it more and more difficult even to get out of bed in the morning. The combined effects of his sleepless tossing and turning, and the nightmares that plagued him when he did sleep, were taking their toll. This morning, he had almost decided to call Lois and tell her he wouldn’t be in. Yet the prospect of staying alone in his house all day was even less appealing, so finally, shoulders stooped with the weight of his worry, he set out down Amherst Street toward the village.
The walk did little to pick up his spirits. Crossing Oak, he came to the part of Amherst Street where both the McGuires and the Beckers lived, and saw Megan McGuire sitting on the swing that hung from the lowest branch of an enormous oak tree in her front yard. He stopped for a moment intending to talk to her, and called out, “Good morning.” At first she didn’t seem to hear him. When he called her name, she looked sharply up at him, then got off the swing and started toward him, cradling a doll in her arms.
The doll that had been an anonymous gift, either for her or for the baby her mother had been about to deliver when Elizabeth McGuire had miscarried.
“It hurts every time I look at it,” Bill McGuire had told Oliver a few weeks before. “But I can’t bring myself to take the damn thing away from her. Since Elizabeth died, she keeps it with her all the time. Even takes it to school with her. I talked to Phil Margolis about it, but he says I should just let her be, at least for a while.” The pain had misted Bill’s eyes, and his voice had cracked. “Of course, that’s what he said about Elizabeth too,” he went on. “But I shouldn’t have let her be. I should have stayed with her, every minute.”
Oliver had tried to reassure him. “You can’t blame yourself, Bill. All of us are responsible for our own lives, but not for other people’s. And Elizabeth was …” He hadn’t finished his sentence, but he hadn’t needed to.
“Delicate?” Bill had asked, his tone tinged with bitterness. “Isn’t that what Edna Burnham always says? That Elizabeth was ‘delicate’?” He’d shaken his head. “She got through her sister’s breakdown when she was a child, and she got through the loss of her parents a few years later. If you’re ’delicate,’ you don’t survive tragedies like that. But losing the baby was just too much for her, and I should have known that. I should have known not to leave her alone that morning.”
Unlike her father, whose grief had not abated, Megan seemed to Oliver to have sublimated her sorrow by focusing entirely on the doll, which she was clutching protectively even now, as she crossed the lawn toward him. He supposed Phil Margolis was right, and that given enough time, Megan would emerge from the shell she seemed to have formed around herself and the doll. As Megan walked slowly toward the sidewalk where he stood, Oliver could see her lips moving as she whispered to the doll.
“How are you today, Megan?” Oliver asked as the little girl stopped a few feet away from him.
“I’m all right,” Megan replied. “Sam and I were playing on the swing.”
“ ‘Sam,’ ” Oliver repeated. “Why did you name him Sam?”
Megan’s eyes instantly darkened. “Sam’s a girl,” she said. “We don’t like boys.”
“I see,” Oliver said gravely. “May I hold Sam?”
Megan shook her head. “Nobody can hold Sam but me,” she said. “She’s my friend, and I’m her friend, and she hates everyone else.” She looked lovingly down into the doll’s face. “Isn’t that right, Sam?” A moment later, as if the doll had spoken to her, Megan looked up at Oliver again. “Sam wants you to go away now,” she announced. “She wants you to leave us alone.”
Oliver hesitated, but suddenly there was a look in Megan’s eyes such as he’d never seen in a child before.
Evil.
The word rose up in his mind and took Oliver by surprise, like a right hook to the jaw. Astonished, he recovered himself to see that the demon-flash was gone. But Megan stared steadily at him, and under the child’s relentless gaze it was finally he who shifted his eyes from hers.
“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say, almost as if the words were coming from someone else. “I didn’t mean to—” He stopped, aware that he’d been about to apologize for having bothered Megan. How ridiculous that he, an adult, should feel the need to apologize to this little girl merely for having spoken a few friendly words!
Worse, why did the way she was staring at him upset him so?
Saying nothing more to her, Oliver turned and continued down Amherst Street.
A moment later he was across from the Becker house. It was empty now. Bonnie and Amy had moved down to Boston, where Ed was still in intensive care. Three vertebrae in his neck had been shattered in his fall the night of the explosion in the basement, and though Ed was still alive, he was dependent on a respirator to breathe for him, and had yet to speak a word since the accident. The doctors assured Bonnie that in time he would be able to talk again, but when Oliver had gone down to Boston the day before yesterday to see Ed, he’d wondered if the doctors had told Bonnie the truth. Though Ed had been awake—Oliver had seen his eyes blink several times during the half hour he sat with Ed—he hadn’t been certain whether Ed even knew he was there, much less recognized him. There was a look in the attorney’s eyes—a gaze that, though not vacant, had not been focused on him either. Ed Becker appeared to have wandered into some other world, a universe buried so deep within his own mind that he was unable to find his way back to the plane of ordinary life in which he had existed before his accident.
When Oliver left the ICU, Bonnie told him about the dreams Ed had been having—dreams Ed had claimed were coming true—and about the stereoscope they’d found in the chest of drawers that Ed brought down from the Asylum.
“I keep thinking about those gifts everyone’s been talking about,” Bonnie said, her eyes looking almost as haunted as her husband’s. “Except the stereoscope wasn’t a gift at all—it just happened to be in one of the drawers in that old dresser.”
Bonnie had told him about the pictures too, and when he returned to Blackstone, Oliver, curious, had gone to their house, entering with the keys she’d provided, to look for the stereoscope and view the pictures.
He’d found no trace either of the stereoscope or of the photographs Bonnie—and Amy too—had described to him. They had vanished as thoroughly as if they’d never existed, though Bonnie had directed him to the coffee table in the living room, where, she said, they’d been on the night that Ed had fallen. Oliver had searched everywhere, but they were nowhere to be found. The house itself had taken on an odd feeling of abandonment, as if it knew that Bonnie had decided she would never set foot in it again. “It isn’t just what happened to Ed,” she’d insisted. “I just don’t think I’d ever feel safe there again. Not after the explosion. I’d never get a wink of sleep in that house. And I could never let Amy sleep there again.”
But it was more than that, Oliver suspected. Bonnie, like so many other people in town, had become convinced that somehow, in some way she didn’t understand, an evil force had invaded Blackstone.
There was that word again. Evil The same word that had popped into his mind when he’d encountered Megan McGuire a few moments ago. But the word hadn’t simply come into Oliver’s mind this time. It was the word that Bonnie Becker herself had used to describe the events that had resulted in her husband’s paralysis, and almost killed her and her daughter as well.
It wasn’t just the house Bonnie Becker wasn’t coming back to.
It was the town too.
“My family is in Boston and all my friends are here,” she’d said. “I don’t have any reason to go back to Blackstone.” She’d hesitated, but then finished the thought. “And frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would stay there, after everything that’s happened.” Then she had whispered the word once more. “Evil. Something evil is going on there.”
Now, in the warmth of the April morning, Oliver Metcalf shivered slightly, as if a chilly presence had touched him. Of course, it couldn’t possibly be true, but on the other hand …
He found himself counting the tragedies that had befallen his friends:
The suicide of Jules Hartwick, which he’d witnessed himself.
The burning of Martha Ward’s house, in which Martha had perished and Rebecca had nearly been killed.
And the horror perpetrated in Germaine Wagner’s house—Germaine’s body crushed beneath the elevator, her elderly wheelchair-bound mother trapped inside the cage and felled by a massive stroke—the night Rebecca had vanished.
Oliver knew that it wasn’t just Bonnie Becker who was whispering about a curse that had befallen Blackstone. The rumors were rampaging through the town like a disease, and everywhere he went, he could feel everyone watching everyone else, as if searching for some sign—some mark—that would tell them who might be next.
There were explanations—reasonable explanations—for everything that had happened in Blackstone. There had to be. And he would find them.
But of one thing he was certain.
There was no evil, no curse. Things like that simply didn’t exist.
And yet, as he continued down the hill into the village and started across the square toward the Chronicle office, he found himself turning to gaze back at the Asylum, looming above the town as it had for nearly a century. And he found himself thinking once more about the outrages that he now knew had been practiced within its walls. That was evil—evil that cloaked itself in the guise of medical science.
If such an evil could prevail, an evil that could turn the Hippocratic oath to acts of unspeakable horror, then perhaps evil did exist and could inhabit other forms, take on other unknowable black shapes.
Turning away from the Asylum’s brooding stare just as he’d turned away from Megan McGuire’s gaze a few minutes ago, Oliver tried to put the unsettling idea out of his mind.
He couldn’t.
The seed was planted. Already, it was starting to grow.