The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 8

Everything had changed.
It seemed to Oliver that he was hanging, suspended, in some netherworld that had no relationship to Blackstone, or to the life he had lived there.
It wasn’t dark—not exactly—and yet he couldn’t see.
He felt as if he were deaf, yet there was no sense of sound at all, no feeling of vibration in his head, or distant muffled noises that he thought he should have heard more clearly.
His sense of touch had deserted him too, and he couldn’t be certain whether he was moving or standing still.
He could have been sitting, or lying down, or even curled up, his arms wrapped around his knees the way he’d liked to sleep when he was a little boy.
A little boy …
The thought hung with him in the void.
That’s what he was: a boy. A little boy. He was no longer Oliver Metcalf, forty-five and a responsible adult, editor of the town newspaper. Somehow, he had been transported into some other world, the world of his childhood that, without knowing it, he had years ago closed off behind a curtain of blackness. But now the curtain was parting. Before him, as he waited, the gray half-light brightened.
The first thing he knew was that he was afraid.
Afraid because he’d done something wrong.
Bad! He was a bad boy! A very bad boy!
He was a bad boy, and his father was going to punish him.
And he deserved to be punished.
Oliver waited quietly in the not-quite-dark, not-quite-light. Somehow he knew that was the right thing to do. Sometimes his father didn’t come for a long time, and sometimes he came right away.
But Oliver knew he must be quiet, and he must wait. Because if he was bad, more bad things would happen.
Scraps of images began to float around him, and suddenly, the light was momentarily brighter again and he was able to catch glimpses of things.
A little girl.
She had a pretty face, framed by long blond hair, and she was holding something in her hands. A doll. A doll with a pretty porcelain face and golden hair.
Suddenly, from out of the twilight silence surrounding him, Oliver heard his father’s voice. But now his father wasn’t speaking to him. He was speaking to the little girl. “You can’t have it anymore,” his father decreed. “Little boys don’t play with dolls. They play with balls and bats!”
Now Oliver could hear the little girl, her sobs enveloping him the way his father’s voice had a moment ago. He saw her face, saw it change, saw the blond locks fall away, heard the cries reach a crescendo then fade away, and the strange silence fell over Oliver once again, and the child’s face took on the same odd grayness that was all around.
The grayness of death.
The little boy was dead.
Dead, like Oliver’s sister.
And in the twilight Oliver’s father was whispering. “Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand why he died?”
Oliver nodded, though he didn’t understand at all.
“We’re going to put the doll away,” his father’s voice whispered. “We’re going to put it away in the secret place. But you’re going to remember, Oliver. You’re going to remember all of it.”
His father’s voice faded again, leaving Oliver enshrouded in the grayness where, as before, he felt as if he was hanging in a void, suspended in a world without sensations.
A world in which there was no difference between night and day, no difference between sound and silence.
No difference between life and death.
Then a point of light appeared.
“Watch the light, Oliver,” his father’s voice instructed, penetrating the silence from an echoing distance that was nowhere yet everywhere.
Like the twilight itself, his father’s voice was simply present.
“Watch the light, Oliver,” his father’s voice said again. “Watch the light and see what it does.”
The light reappeared, a flame now, flickering in front of Oliver’s eyes.
Then the flame began to move, and now Oliver could see something else.
An arm.
An arm covered with soft skin, soft and smooth and pale. A woman’s skin.
The flame moved closer and closer to the skin.
Oliver wanted to cry out, to move the flame away from the woman’s skin, but the twilight held him in its thrall as tightly as if it were made with ropes and straps.
The flame licked at the skin on the arm, and then, from out of the silence, came a sound.
The roar of a dragon.
The roar sounded again, and then Oliver saw the dragon looming out of the twilight, its eyes glowing like twin rubies, its golden scales glittering even in the strange gray light. Its mouth opened, and once again it roared, a great bellow that hung in the air as a blast of fire burst from its throat.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the dragon vanished into the twilight, and all that was left was the vision of the woman’s arm, the skin charred black, great chunks of it peeling off, dropping away to reveal the raw flesh beneath.
Then, from somewhere in the gray eternity around him, Oliver heard the dragon roar once more, and the flesh before his eyes burst into flame.
Now he heard his father’s voice. “Do you understand, Oliver?”
“I understand,” Oliver silently breathed.
“You will remember?” his father’s voice demanded, and though the words were formed into a question, Oliver understood what would happen if he forgot.
“I will remember,” he promised.
“We will put the dragon with the doll,” his father’s voice whispered. “And when next you see it, you will know to whom it should belong.”
Once again time and space melded together.
Oliver hung in the gray silence.
More images flickered in front of him.
A scrap of cloth, intricately embroidered, a single letter, mirrored, worked perfectly into one of its corners.
A face appeared, and snakes writhed about him, and once again he heard his father’s voice.
“Remember what I’m showing you, Oliver. Remember what I’m saying. If you forget, you know what will happen.”
Oliver knew he would not forget.
And after his father had spoken, and hidden the scrap of cloth away with the doll and the dragon, those images too fell away into the gray morass, as surely as if they’d never been there at all.
“But you’ll remember,” his father’s voice whispered. “When it’s time, you will remember.”
“I promise, Daddy.” The words were no more than an unvoiced whimper, but they echoed in Oliver’s mind as loudly as had the dragon’s now-forgotten roar. “I promise …”
More images rose out of the gray, took focus for a moment, then disappeared so utterly that they might never have existed. And as each of them flickered through his consciousness, only to be lost again an instant later, Oliver’s father’s voice kept whispering.
“You’ll know what to do, boy. When the time comes, you’ll know what to do as surely as if you had become my own reincarnation. You are all that’s left of me, and you’ll do it. After they’ve destroyed me—after they’ve sent me away and destroyed my work—you will still be here. You will be my sword of vengeance. You will do exactly as I tell you, and it will be as if I’d come back myself, to destroy the destroyers.
“And do you know why you’ll do it, Oliver?”
“Because I’ve been bad,” Oliver whispered. “Because I’ve been a very bad boy, and I have to do whatever you want me to do.”
“That’s right, Oliver. You’ve been a bad boy.” His father’s words lashed out with the sting of a whip. “Killed them! Killed your mother! Killed your sister! Evil, vile child!”
Oliver tried to shrink away from the accusations, tried to find a way to drop back into the comforting silence of the twilight abyss, but there was no escape. Wherever he turned, his father’s words were there, piercing into his consciousness, jabbing at him, torturing him, until finally, the last of his resistance crumpled.
“I understand, Daddy,” he said. “I understand.”
It was then that the darkness closed around him once again, and he sank gratefully back into an oblivion that was free not only of the strange images but of the sound of his father’s voice.
It was not, though, an oblivion in which Oliver could dwell forever.
Sooner or later, consciousness would inevitably return.
Consciousness, and the evil pleasure his father demanded.
Oliver woke up in darkness.
Not the familiar darkness that blanketed his room when he woke up at night, thinking at first there was no light at all, only to find that the shadows that moved on the walls and ceiling, cast by the street lamp outside, were old friends. In that kind of darkness he could snuggle down deeper in his bed, pulling the covers up tight under his chin as he let his imagination run wild, seeing all kinds of wonderful things in the dark shapes on the walls. He liked that kind of darkness.
Some nights he imagined he was in a tent in the jungle, and the shadows he was seeing were cast by lions and tigers and elephants.
But the darkness in which he awakened this time was different.
An empty, scary kind of darkness.
The kind of darkness that made him think that things he couldn’t see were watching him.
The kind of darkness that made him shiver, even though it wasn’t cold.
“Daddy?” he called out, keeping his voice soft enough so that if there were any wild animals lurking in the darkness, they might not hear him.
There was no answer. As Oliver came fully awake, he realized he wasn’t in his bed at all.
He wasn’t even in his room.
And his whole body was sore.
The blackness turned to a funny gray color; then, as it grew brighter, became a bright, blinding white, as a powerful, naked bulb switched on.
White tiles on the floor. And on the wall.
White paint on the ceiling.
And then his father’s face, looming above him, flanked by two big men in white coats.
“You’re not a very good boy, Oliver,” his father said. “You’re a bad boy. A very bad boy, who killed his sister.”
“I didn’t!” Oliver cried. “I—”
Before he could finish his sentence, his father pressed a button in a wooden box. Oliver convulsed as the jolt of electricity passed through him. Then, as his body relaxed, he cried:
“No!”
His father pressed the button again. This time as the shock shuddered through him, a gush of vomit spewed from his mouth.
“Clean him,” Oliver’s father said, and the two men in white coats stepped over to the table and began wiping the vomit away with a towel.
His father pressed the button again. He was sobbing now, whimpering, his stomach churning, his throat filling with bile as his body reacted to the torture.
Then, in a small voice that seemed to come from somewhere outside himself, Oliver heard himself say, “I’ve been a bad boy. A very bad boy.”
“That’s right,” his father said. “A very bad boy. And now I’m going to tell you why you’re a bad boy, and what you did.”
His breath coming in short, shallow gasps, Oliver listened as his father explained how he had taken the razor and what he had done with it. His father’s voice droned on and on, and as he spoke, tears came into Oliver’s eyes.
Tears of sorrow, and tears of shame.
And at last, when it was over, and he understood everything his father had told him, he slipped from the white tiled room and pulled the door closed behind him. Outside in the corridor the cries and screams that had echoed through the building for so long could still be heard, but not by Oliver Metcalf.
All he could hear as he slowly mounted the stairs toward the first floor was the sound of his father’s voice, repeating over and over what he, a very bad boy, had done.
And telling him what still was left to do.