The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 6

Silence at last hung over Harvey Connally’s house on Elm Street. For the last two hours, as first Philip Margolis and then Steve Driver arrived, the rooms had rung with the comings and goings that attended the business of death. After Dr. Margolis’s preliminary examination of the body, Harvey Connally’s remains had been carried out of the house, to be transported not to Broder’s Funeral Parlor but to Blackstone Memorial, where an autopsy would be performed.
“It’s not really a legal necessity,” the doctor had explained to Oliver, “but given recent events, I think you ought to let me do it. If I can say I did a thorough autopsy, and the cause of your uncle’s death was the massive heart attack it obviously appears to be, then that should put an end to any talk.” With a smile and shrug, he added, “Or at least keep it down to a dull roar, since there won’t be any way to shut Edna Burnham up short of a restraining order.”
Oliver managed a faint smile that conveyed his resignation in the face of the inevitable rumormongering the old lady would shortly be embarking on. “Somehow I don’t think even a court order would stop Edna from …” His voice trailed off, but he didn’t have to say any more. Even without Edna Burnham fueling the fire, there was bound to be speculation that there was more to Harvey Connally’s sudden death than appeared on the surface. That assumption had already been borne out by the crowd that had begun to assemble within minutes after Steve Driver’s arrival. Though no one inside the house was aware of the neighbors and passersby beyond the laurel hedge when Jeff Broder had arrived to discuss the funeral arrangements with Oliver, Broder reported that at least a dozen people were gathered on the sidewalk outside the gate. While the funeral director, whose family had been burying the dead of Blackstone for three generations, calmly went over the arrangements that Harvey Connally had made for himself several years earlier, Steve Driver went outside to try to clear the onlookers away.
He’d had no success.
Now, however, with Oliver’s uncle’s body gone, it seemed to Oliver as if the lodestone had been removed. By the time the last of those who had legitimate business at the house had left, the crowd too began to fall away. Their curiosity had been satisfied: they’d watched in somber silence as Harvey Connally left his house for the last time.
Oliver closed the front door after seeing Jeff Broder out. Left in the quiet of the house, he felt more alone than ever before in his life.
He began wandering slowly through the deserted rooms, acutely aware of the absence of his uncle.
After his father died, this house had been his home, at least during the times when he wasn’t away, first at boarding school or at summer camp, then at college. Every room contained memories. The kitchen, where he’d sat on a stool watching his uncle’s housekeeper, old Mrs. Perry, stir the pots from which magical aromas wafted into his nostrils. The dining room, where he and his uncle had sat eating the meals Mrs. Perry fixed, and talking over anything that came into Oliver’s mind. In the living room, the melodies Harvey Connally had picked out on the grand piano seemed still to hang in the air, and upstairs, in the room that had been Oliver’s, he could still summon the smell of a blossom-laden summer breeze drifting in through the open window as he lay in his boyhood bed. Now, of course, the room was tinged with mustiness, the scent of disuse and abandonment, for after Mrs. Perry died, his uncle decided to look after himself, pleading that he was far too old to accustom himself to a stranger in his house.
Finally, after Oliver had wandered restlessly through every other room in the house, he could no longer put off returning to the study, where the flat mahogany box still sat on the bookshelf where he’d put it after calling Phil Margolis.
He hadn’t mentioned the box to either the doctor or Steve Driver. The presence of yet another mysterious package would only become new grist for the gossip mill that was already grinding at full speed in Blackstone.
Nor had he yet opened it.
Now, as he touched its smooth surface, a strange shock ran through him, as if the case had been charged with electricity.
Had it happened before, when he’d picked up the box to move it from the desk to the bookshelf? He couldn’t recall. His uncle’s ominous words, swiftly followed by his sudden passing, had made the rest of the morning a blur for Oliver.
I never believed what your father told me. Never. The statement still echoed through Oliver’s head.
A moment later the strange sensation passed. He picked up the box, moved back to his uncle’s desk, and set it down.
As he gazed at it, he realized that it looked vaguely familiar. Examining it more closely, seeing the ornately worked medallion that was inlaid in the lid, he suddenly knew why it seemed familiar.
His father’s.
It had been his father’s.
But what could be in it?
He reached for it again, this time to open it, but just as his fingers touched the latches that secured the box’s lid, something stopped him.
Not here!
The voice was so distinct that Oliver, startled, found himself glancing around the room to see who had uttered the words. But the room, like the house itself, was empty save for him.
Home. Take the box home.
Again the words were so clear that it was hard for Oliver to believe they’d risen from his own mind. Nonetheless, he found himself obeying them. Picking up the box, he left his uncle’s house. But instead of leaving by the front door, he went out through the kitchen, down the driveway, then turned onto Harvard Street. The box, which for some reason he didn’t quite understand he’d slipped under his jacket, felt almost warm, its heat penetrating his thin shirt to his skin, though he knew the warmth could be nothing more than an illusion. Quickening his step, he strode up the hill, but as he came to the burned-out wreckage of Martha Ward’s house, he stopped.
Again, there was the strange sensation—almost a vibration coursing through him.
Standing stock-still, Oliver gazed at the charred remains of the house from which Rebecca Morrison had fled only a few short weeks ago. In his mind’s eye, but so vividly he could have been watching the fire itself, he once more saw the flames consuming it.
Suddenly, the sound of laughter penetrated his reverie. He spun around to see who was there.
The street and sidewalk were empty.
His heartbeat speeding, Oliver continued on his way up the hill, passing the Hartwicks’ but neither stopping nor even glancing at it. At the path that would lead him through the woods to the Asylum’s grounds, he left the sidewalk and, out of sight of Jules and Madeline’s house, felt his pulse begin to slow. Then the odd vibrating sensation vanished so abruptly and completely that he wondered whether he’d actually felt it or whether the disconcerting tingling had been nothing more than a result of the shock of his uncle’s death.
Just as he emerged from the trees onto the weed-choked grounds surrounding the Asylum’s hulking mass, it began again.
A heat radiating from the mahogany case. Hotter now, pulsing.
Drop it, he told himself.
Just let go of it, drop it, and walk away.
Or better yet, smash it underfoot and scatter the pieces—and whatever might be inside the box—across the field so they’d be plowed beneath the earth when the Blackstone Center project finally got under way.
Bury it under concrete. Put it where it cannot possibly ever again be found.
But instead of dropping the box, Oliver realized he was clutching it tighter, pressing it against his body as if at any second someone might try to snatch it from him.
He began walking again, picking his way across the grounds, but it was not toward his house that he was moving.
Instead, he drew closer and closer to the Asylum itself. With every step he took, his pulse quickened, until he could hear the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears.
He came at last to the front steps. He hesitated there, waiting for the familiar pain in his head to begin, quickly building until either he turned and fled to the sanctuary of his house or the blackness closed around him, felling him as surely as a blow to the back of the head.
Today, though, the pain did not come. Unable to stop himself, carried forward on a wave of foreboding and fear, he mounted the stone steps and reached out to grip the great latch on the door.
He paused then, and though his hand remained on the cold bronze latch, he gazed around as if taking a last look at a landscape he might never see again. He looked down the hill at the house he’d lived in for the first seven years of his life, and the last twenty-five.
For a moment—just a moment—Oliver thought he glimpsed a face in one of its windows, and he felt his heart quicken with anticipation until he realized it was nothing more than a trick of the light.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of movement. He whirled around, and as he turned, thought he saw a small figure disappearing into the woods.
A girl. A little girl, who looked like—
Mallory?
Impossible. An illusion. It had to be no more than an illusion, just as the face in the window of his house had been a fleeting and cruel illusion, and not Rebecca at all.
Yet from somewhere—somewhere distant—he thought he could barely hear a child’s voice, his sister’s voice, calling out to him.
Calling for him to come to her?
Or calling a warning to him, to stay away?
A trick of the light, and now a trick of the wind? A whisper, and now, nothing but silence.
His hand tightening on the latch to the Asylum’s door, Oliver turned the knob and swung the heavy oak portal open.
Motes of dust hung thickly in the air inside, and the chill of the building’s interior seemed to reach out and draw him in.
Steeling himself against the whipping pain he still anticipated would lash through his head at any moment, Oliver moved through the shadowy interior of the building as if in a dream, not certain where he was going, or why, but knowing he would recognize his destination when he came to it.
His footsteps echoed in the emptiness of the building, but he was hardly aware of them, for his ears were filled with other sounds.
Ghostly sounds, out of the past.
Voices whispering, mumbling incoherently.
Terrified shrieks, floating from the floors above.
Hopeless moans, seeping up from beneath the floor, surrounding him.
Oliver moved from one room to another, until at last he came to the room that had been his father’s office. There he finally took the mahogany box from beneath his jacket, and set it gently on the floor.
With trembling fingers he loosened the latches, then raised the lid.
Oliver Metcalf gazed upon the razor, and an image rose unbidden—unwanted—from the deepest realms of his, subconscious.
It was a vision of the razor’s blade, gleaming so bright a silver that it nearly blinded him as it arced in the air—slicing through his sister’s throat.
His hands shaking, Oliver picked up the razor and opened it.
And heard his sister’s dying scream …
Rebecca lay inside a swirling cloud of fog, a mist that engulfed her but, strangely, did not make her feel afraid, for out of the mists was emerging an image that had appeared in her dreams and fantasies for as long as she could remember. A knight, his armor burnished to the finish of a mirror, astride a great horse. A horse as black as coal, with a flowing mane and tail that whipped in the wind as the stallion bore the knight toward her, his banner—a streaming scarlet flag woven of the finest silk—billowing in the breeze with the softness of a cloud.
Now, far in the distance, muffled by the eddying mists, she thought she could hear the horse’s hooves, and a thrill of excitement ran through her as she waited for the knight to be revealed to her. His strong face. His kind eyes.
Oliver.
It would be Oliver, riding to her rescue, racing toward her through the misty twilight to lift her up and swing her onto the steed’s mighty back, where she would slip her arms around him and cling to him as they sped away.
But then, as the sound of hoofbeats grew nearer, she felt the first faint stirring of apprehension.
Abruptly, the fog closed in. She could feel the danger lurking everywhere around her, hidden just beyond the limits of her vision, waiting for the fog to thicken and the twilight to turn into night before creeping close, circling her, preparing to strike.
Ghostly faces appeared.
Eyes, feral and glinting with the fire of evil.
Snouts, tapering to cruel points.
Fangs, dripping with yellow saliva.
More eyes, yellow, and sunk deep beneath coarse brows, fixing on her with a glare of hatred.
Demons in search of souls to consume.
She tried to scream, but her throat constricted. Deafening shrieks of clattering laughter beat at her ears as if a pack of hyenas was closing on its prey, attacking, tearing it to shreds.
Rebecca turned to flee, to run from the hellhounds that drew closer with every passing second.
She twisted, turning first one way and then the other. No escape, no place to run.
The terror that had been escalating inside her erupted into panic. She threw herself hard to one side. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder, and a muffled screech of agony filled her throat, causing her to gag. Her breath caught in her lungs with a terrible, wracking heaving that convulsed her whole body—and brought her abruptly out of the clutches of the nightmare. But she awakened into the numbing fear that had held her for what seemed to be an eternity.
She became aware again of the tape that covered her eyes and mouth, blinding her and imprisoning the hacking coughs that continued to convulse her lungs until she thought her chest might actually explode.
Now, fully awake, she felt once more the aching cold that had slowly taken possession of every cell in her body, and for a moment she almost wished she could retreat into the fog of her dream. But then, as the fearsome, leering faces she’d seen in the mists rose before her once again, she knew that sleep—and the terrors it would bring—could no longer protect her from the horror to which she had fallen victim. Banishing the visions from her subconscious, Rebecca slowly regained control over her weakening body. The queasiness in her stomach began to ease, and the tightness in her chest to loosen. Her shoulder, which she’d smashed against the hard, cold surface next to her when she’d tried to thrash her way out of the grip of the nightmare, was throbbing painfully, but she knew that with time even that ache would slowly fade.
Unless, of course, she died.
It was going to happen; she knew that now. Sooner or later, she would succumb to something that was finally too much for her to bear. Silently, lying still in the darkness, she prayed that her body would fail her first, for she had already glimpsed the terrors she would face if it was her mind that finally betrayed her. Hell could hold no horrors worse than to be submerged forever in the dreams that tormented her, or the cold, dark prison in which she lived.
Then, so slowly she was barely aware it was happening, her racing pulse at last began to slow, and one by one she began to put her terrors aside.
She was not dead yet, nor had she lost her mind.
Somewhere, she told herself, beyond the blackness and the bonds that held her, Oliver was still searching for her, would still come to rescue her from the eternal night into which she’d vanished. But even as she clung to that sweet thought, she heard once more the echoing hooves of her nightmare, and for an instant thought that perhaps her mind had failed her after all.
Not the beat of hooves sounding in the darkness.
Footsteps.
The Tormentor was drawing close.
To feed her?
To slake her thirst?
Or to offer her up to some new terror she would not be able to anticipate until it was actually upon her?
Click.
She heard the latch of the door release, then the creak of unoiled hinges.
The sound of leather soles on a hard floor.
She sensed him now, standing above her.
Could he see her?
Did he know who she was?
Did he even care?
Or was she only someone who had come to hand? As she’d run through the darkness of that night that was now nearly lost in the dim recesses of her memory, fleeing the Wagners’ in hope of getting help, had her abductor found her by accident?
Rebecca held herself perfectly still, and uttered no sound at all, determined to let him know nothing of her fear or her pain.
If he sensed her weakness, surely he would kill her.
The dark figure gazed down upon his prize. Everything was almost right, everything in readiness.
Yet not quite.
Things were not exactly as they had been, not precisely as he saw them in his mind’s eye.
He reached down and turned a tap.
The tub in which his prisoner lay slowly began to fill.
Then he turned away, having no need to watch until the climactic moment came.
The moment for which he’d waited, had prepared for so many years ago, and that now had finally arrived.
But not yet.
Not quite yet.
Not until the tub was filled.
And every memory savored.
For a moment, when she heard the trickle of water from a tap, Rebecca felt a flash of hope—he’d come to give her water.
But then, when no fingers tore the tape from her mouth or held a glass to her lips, she realized that it was something else.
And when she felt the icy water touch her legs, felt the freeze of winter truly begin to numb her flesh, she realized what her fate was going to be.
She understood the cold smoothness of the surface her face had touched, grasped the meaning of the hardness of everything around her. She was lying in a tub, and the Tormentor was filling it with water.
He was going to drown her.
Unless, before she drowned, the chill of the near-frozen water killed her first.
She felt the courage and determination she’d mustered only a few moments ago drain away, and knew, at long last, that the end was near.