“The sugar bowl isn’t full,” she announced at the exact second she lifted its lid.
“I’m sorry, Miss Clara,” Rebecca said, her face reddening. Why hadn’t Germaine told her to fill it? “I’ll fill it right away.”
“You won’t,” Clara Wagner declared. “Germaine will do it while you set the tea table.”
Rebecca saw a vein in Germaine’s forehead throbbing, but she said nothing as Germaine picked the offending sugar bowl off the tray and retreated back toward the kitchen. Rebecca herself followed Clara Wagner as she led the way to the front parlor, where a tea table waited, which Rebecca had already set with three places. Clara eyed them suspiciously, but Rebecca had been careful to get each utensil straight. The damask napkins were folded perfectly. She held her breath as Clara’s eyes moved from the china to the jam pots to the butter dish, but those too seemed to meet her standards.
“You may set the tray down,” she decreed.
They waited in silence until Germaine arrived with the sugar bowl. Rebecca carefully fixed its level in her mind, determined not to make the same mistake again.
Germaine poured the first cup of tea and set it in front of her mother. “Why don’t you show Rebecca the handkerchief I gave you?” she asked, her eyes flicking toward Rebecca as if to see if the younger woman would contradict her.
She did give it to her mother, Rebecca reminded herself. Oliver gave it to me, but it was Germaine who gave it to Miss Clara. “Thank you,” she said as Germaine finally passed her a cup of tea. Then she turned to Clara. “I’d love to see the handkerchief.”
Clara Wagner’s hand moved automatically to the pocket into which she’d stuffed the handkerchief. “I didn’t bring it downstairs,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
The vein in Germaine’s forehead began throbbing again as she saw the lump in her mother’s pocket and instantly understood what it was. Still stinging from her humiliation over the sugar bowl, she glared at her mother. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you give it back to me?”
Clara’s eyes met her daughter’s. “I don’t have it,” she insisted.
“You do,” Germaine replied coldly. She reached over to take the handkerchief out of her mother’s pocket, but Clara’s fingers closed on her wrist. For a long moment mother and daughter glared at each other. “Are you going to call me a liar again, Mother?” Germaine asked.
Suddenly Clara’s hand released Germaine’s wrist and she pulled the handkerchief out of her pocket. “Very well,” she said, her voice rasping. “If you want it that badly, have it! Have it with my blessing!” Crushing the handkerchief into a wad, she hurled it in her daughter’s face.
Rebecca held her breath, bracing herself for the scene she was certain was about to ensue, but to her relief, Germaine didn’t respond to her mother’s fury. She merely retrieved the handkerchief from the floor where it had fallen, spread it flat on the table, then folded it carefully. She slipped it into the breast pocket of her blouse so the mirrored R showed perfectly. “There,” she said, her eyes fixing once more on Rebecca. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Without waiting for an answer, Germaine lifted the lid off the box of chocolates. To her horror, she found no candy inside. Instead of the array of chocolates she’d been expecting, she saw nothing but a pulsating mass of ants, gnats, and flies. Her eyes widened in terror as a cloud of insects swarmed up from the box, flying directly at her face. Screaming, Germaine leaped up from her chair, overturning it in her haste to escape the horde of insects still pouring from the open box. Instinctively, she lashed out at the teeming mass, trying to fend it off, and succeeded only in overturning the teapot. As scalding tea gushed across the table and into Clara’s lap, Germaine backed away from the table, but her terror only increased as she spotted the tangle of snakes writhing on the floor around her feet.
Another scream emerged from her throat, and she fled, sobbing and stumbling, from the room.
Rebecca, stunned by Germaine’s sudden, unexplained outburst, was frozen in her chair until Clara Wagner’s voice penetrated her shock and she realized that the old woman was shouting at her, “Help me! Help me!”
Her dazed confusion broken, Rebecca jumped up and began blotting at Clara Wagner’s skirt with a napkin. Her mind was groping for some explanation, but all she could think of was that suddenly, in no more than the blink of an eye, Germaine had gone crazy. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?
“What was it?” she asked. “What happened?”
Irritably brushing Rebecca away, Clara Wagner picked up another napkin and started working on her skirt herself. “What does it matter?” she asked. “She’s ruined my tea.” Without another word, Clara backed away from the table and left the parlor.
Oliver’s head snapped up as the file slipped from his lap to the floor, and he bent down to pick it up. His headache was finally loosening its grip, but his whole body hurt, as if he’d just put himself through a punishing workout. His skin was covered with a cold sheen of sweat, and he felt utterly exhausted. It was only as he bent to gather the contents of the file together again that he glanced out the window and noticed that the last of the daylight had slipped away.
Darkness and shadows had enshrouded Blackstone, and the Asylum, looming at the top of the hill, cast the darkest shadow of all. As he gazed at the silhouette of the structure for which his father had been the final overseer, Oliver tried to imagine Malcolm Metcalf committing the kind of atrocities that had been so coldly and clinically described in the case history he now held in his hand.
He could not make himself believe it, despite the conclusive evidence in the pages he had just read—pages of precise notations in his father’s own distinctive handwriting.
Accept it, he told himself, accept that the treatments he had prescribed for that patient were far from uncommon back then; indeed, they were considered the most advanced thinking in the treatment of mental illness. Why, then, shouldn’t his father have used them?
His thoughts were interrupted by a flash of light from the top of the hill. Oliver froze, but then decided it had been an illusion.
He saw another flash of light—barely more than a flicker—illuminating one of the third-floor windows for a second, only to disappear as quickly as had the first.
A moment later he saw it again, and then again.
For the tiniest fraction of a second reason completely deserted him and he felt an absolute certainty that he knew who was walking in the Asylum this night.
It was his father.
His father, somehow come back to prowl the darkened corridors of his long-silent domain while he himself read of the sadistic “treatments” in which Malcolm Metcalf had once indulged.
But as quickly as the terrifying sensation came over him, it drained away, and he realized the truth.
He was seeing nothing more than the beam of a flashlight as someone explored the Asylum’s empty rooms. Peering out the window, he spotted the dim shape of a car parked close by the Asylum’s entrance, and then remembered that this was the day Bill McGuire and Ed Becker were going to take Melissa Holloway through the building.
Straightening the file and putting it back in the box with the others, Oliver went downstairs, took a light jacket from a hook by the front door, and went out into the gathering night. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to go into the Asylum, he could certainly wait on the steps for his friends to emerge. But as he started up the slope toward the dark stone structure, he began to feel the familiar throbbing in his right temple.
With every step the pain grew worse, but Oliver kept moving doggedly onward, refusing to give in to the agony in his head. As he reached the bottom step of the short flight leading to the Asylum’s front door, a wave of nausea rose in his stomach and he lurched to a stop, dropping to his knees as he felt a clammy sweat break out over his entire body.
Nausea twisted at his guts. Oliver struggled to breathe, then staggered back to his feet. He gazed up at the double oaken doors at the top of the steps. The
y seemed to grow before his very eyes, doubling in size, then quadrupling. A gurgle of terror bubbling in his throat, Oliver recoiled backward as the great doors began to tip toward him, and he knew that if he stayed where he was even a second longer, he would surely be crushed. Fighting the keening scream that was about to explode from his throat, he turned and fled into the darkness.
Melissa Holloway hesitated at the top of the stairs leading to the Asylum’s basement. A shiver passed through her and she felt an odd sense of being suddenly close to some incomprehensible evil.
“We don’t have to go down there,” Bill McGuire offered, sensing her discomfort. “If you’d rather—”
“It’s all right,” Melissa quickly cut in. “I came here to see the building, and I’d like to see it all.” But as she gazed down at the black pool into which the steps led, she wondered if she really did want to see what was down there. A moment later, though, as the flashlights Ed Becker and Bill McGuire were carrying washed enough of the darkness away to reveal nothing more threatening than what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary corridor, her fears eased. Yet as she followed the two men down the stairs, their footsteps echoing hollowly, her sense of an evil presence grew stronger.
“Are you sure there’s no one here but us?” she asked, and immediately regretting her question, reproached herself for sounding like a skittish girl.
“You never really know, do you?” Ed Becker suggested, playfully picking up on her nervousness. “Who knows what evil once roamed these …” His words died away as Bill McGuire cast the beam of his light into one of the rooms that opened off the corridor and they saw the shackles hanging from its walls. “Jesus,” the lawyer whispered. “You don’t think they actually used those things on people, do you?”
Melissa Holloway stared at the thick leather cuffs that hung from the ends of heavy chains bolted to the wall. “Can you think of another purpose for them?”
Neither of the men made a reply, but Bill McGuire shifted his light quickly back to the corridor.
The next two doors were both pierced with small windows, and when Bill McGuire opened one of them, Melissa and Ed Becker both knew why.
Little more than cells, there were still remnants of padding hanging from their walls.
There was no furniture.
The three of them gazed wordlessly at the room for a moment, then moved on.
The room next to the padded cell was equipped with three large porcelain tubs, each of them big enough for an adult to stretch out in. All three had heavy wooden covers. The covers were notched at one end. Ed Becker stared at them, puzzled.
Again, it was as if Melissa Holloway read his mind. “For the patients’ heads,” she said softly. “No one stays in a tub of cold water voluntarily. So they used covers to hold them in.”
Ed Becker stared open-mouthed at the tubs and tried to imagine what it would be like to be closed into one of them. The cold water would be horrible; the immobility and helplessness even worse. Shuddering, he turned away. “What the hell kind of place was this?” he muttered as he moved quickly back into the hall.
“No different from hundreds of others, I suspect,” Melissa Holloway replied.
The three of them finished their tour of the basement in silence, as if compelled to investigate every one of the dank rooms, all of them used for purposes that none of them really wanted to talk about.
As they finally turned back toward the stairs, Melissa shook her head sadly. “I wonder if we’re really doing the right thing,” she said, remembering not only the rooms they had just inspected but the ones upstairs as well. “Maybe it would be better just to tear the whole place down.”
Bill McGuire and Ed Becker glanced at each other. “Too late for that,” the lawyer replied. “The structure’s sound. Besides, if it was going to be torn down, it should have been done a long time ago.” A grim smile played over his lips. “I know it’s spooky, Melissa—frankly, I’m a bit spooked by it myself—but whatever went on here happened so long ago that practically everyone’s forgotten about it. All it is now is an historical building. In fact,” he added as they emerged back onto the first floor, “it’s a registered landmark building, so even if we wanted to, we couldn’t tear it down.”
When they came to the front door, Melissa took one last glance back at the shadowy interior. A shudder passed through her, as though some indefinable evil that lurked within the building’s dark stone walls were making its presence known. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking the feeling off, “I guess sometimes I just wonder if places like this should really be saved. It’s as if so much unhappiness lived here that it seeped into the walls themselves. And I wonder if anything we do will ever really change that.”
Bill McGuire glanced anxiously at the banker. “You’re not changing your mind about the loan, are you?” he asked.
Melissa hesitated, then chuckled. “No,” she assured him. “I’m not. I’m just musing, that’s all. As a person, the whole place gives me the willies. But as a banker, I have to say it looks like a terrific investment.”
A moment later they drove out of the Asylum grounds, totally unaware that only a few minutes before, Oliver Metcalf had stood on the porch, waiting for them—then fled.
The headache slowly eased, the nausea passed, and the black veil of terror that had fallen over Oliver lifted.
Yet he was still nearly blind, for only a faint glimmer of starlight broke the darkness that surrounded him.
He was running. But where? And from what?
His foot struck something. Tripping, he lunged uncontrollably forward, then sprawled facedown on the ground.
Instinctively throwing his right hand out to break his fall, it too struck something—something hard and rough—and a second later his other hand found something else. Gasping to catch his breath, fighting the urge to leap to his feet once again and flee whatever nameless thing might be pursuing him, he made himself stay on the ground, forced himself not to give in again to the panic that had overcome him on the Asylum steps, and concentrated on calming his fraying nerves.
There’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing chasing you. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all!
As his breathing and pulse slowly returned to normal, he sat up, reached out, and finally understood where he was.
The cemetery.
The little plot of land where for nearly half a century the unclaimed bodies of patients whose families had abandoned them to the confines of the Asylum’s walls had been laid to rest once their tortured journeys through life had finally come to an end.
A potter’s field, really, for it was as filled with the homeless and the friendless as any other paupers’ graveyard might be.
Except that not only the long-forgotten patients of the Asylum had been buried here.
Finally getting to his feet, Oliver found himself threading his way among the weathered granite grave markers toward the far corner, where, in a small area set off by a rusting wrought-iron fence, his father was buried. Pausing at the gate, he gazed down at the headstone that was barely visible beneath the night sky.
Malcolm Metcalf
Born February 25, 1914
Died March 19, 1959
Why had his father killed himself?
And why had he chosen to die on that particular date?
Always—since he was a small boy—Oliver had assumed his father had chosen the date out of grief for his lost child.
But what if it had been something else?
Oliver didn’t know; would probably never know.
Even now, nearly forty years later, he remembered practically nothing of any of it.
Whatever memories he had were buried as deeply in his subconscious as his father was buried in the dark, cold ground.
For a long time Oliver stood in the quiet of the night, staring down at the grave marker. Then snatches of the medical record he’d read only a little while ago began to drift through his mind.
Restraints … ice-cold baths … electroconvul
sive therapy.
“What did you do, Father?” The words forming in his mind were barely audible on his lips. But then, as the import of the question grew, he repeated it aloud: “What did you do?”
Still the question swelled, taking on the force of a drumbeat, growing louder, louder in his mind, and once more he uttered it. This time, though, it wasn’t a whisper. This time it was a howl of anguish, bellowed into the darkening night.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Chapter 5
Germaine Wagner huddled in her bed, her blanket wrapped around her, struggling against the panic that had overwhelmed her in the front parlor. She had neither turned on the light when she came into the room nor changed into her nightgown before retreating to the bed, so terrified was she of what she might see in the bright light of the chandelier, or hidden in the shadows of her closet. For a time—a long time—she sat trembling in the darkness, her heart pounding so hard she could hear nothing else, the vein in her forehead pulsing so strongly she feared she might have a stroke.
But as the endless minutes ticked by, the adrenaline in her blood began to be reabsorbed and her pulse to calm. As she emerged from the shock of her terror, her wits slowly came back to her and she began consciously to try to relax, to ease the tension that had led her to draw her legs up against her chest and to wrap her arms tightly around her knees.
This is not me, she told herself. I don’t react like this. Not to anything.
But a second later, as her memory released a vision of the flies and gnats that had swarmed around her, and the snakes that writhed on the floor of the parlor, another wave of panic towered over her. This time, though, Germaine retained her self-control.
It didn’t happen, she silently insisted. Whatever it was, I only imagined it.
Germaine Wagner knew she was not the type to imagine things. She had always prided herself on her ability to see things clearly, and exactly as they were. Even when she’d been a child and her playmates had gazed up into the sky to envision elephants and tigers and other wondrous creatures soaring overhead, Germaine had seen nothing but stratus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus clouds drifting on the wind. The mind, she knew, was intended to be an analytical tool, and she believed in keeping it well honed, abstaining from ingesting any chemical that might interfere with its workings. She had never had a drink, never smoked a marijuana cigarette, and had certainly never experimented with any of the drugs that—