Suddenly he wondered if he really wanted the oak dresser they’d come to pick up.
“Getting to you?” Bill McGuire asked, grinning at the lawyer’s obvious discomfort. “Maybe you’d like to wait outside while I go up and get the dresser.”
“I’m fine,” Ed Becker insisted, hearing too late the extra emphasis that belied his words. “All right, so I think it’s a little creepy in here. So sue me.”
McGuire laughed. “Spoken like a true lawyer.” But then he too shivered, and found himself wishing he could just turn on the lights and wash the dark shadows from the rooms they were passing through.
Both men breathed a little easier as they came to the stairs to the second floor, if only because of the sunlight flooding through the windows behind the staircase. Yet even here they found a grim reminder of the building’s last use, for the thick metal grill that had been placed over the windows decades earlier still cast forbidding prison-bar shadows on the bare wood floor.
It was as Ed Becker came to the top of the stairs that the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and goose bumps rose on both his arms.
He knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that he and Bill McGuire were not alone.
An instant later, as McGuire too froze, he heard a sound.
It was faint, barely audible, but it was there.
“Did you hear that?” McGuire asked, his hand closing on Becker’s forearm.
“I—I’m not sure,” Ed Becker whispered, unwilling to admit how frightened he was. “Maybe …” His words died on his lips as he heard the sound again. This time there was no mistaking it.
Somewhere down the hall, in one of the long-abandoned rooms, someone—or something—was moving.
Ed Becker tried to swallow the lump of fear that blocked his throat.
The sound came a third time. It seemed to echo from one of the rooms on the left side of the wide corridor, halfway down the hall.
The room where the dresser is, Ed Becker thought, and his fear instantly notched a level higher.
Moving to the left so he was pressed protectively close to the wall, Bill McGuire began edging slowly down the corridor. Ed Becker followed hesitantly, his movement motivated less by bravery than by terror at the idea of remaining in the hall by himself.
As they drew closer to the room, they heard the sound yet again.
A scratching, as if something were trying to get through a door.
The door, which stood slightly ajar, suddenly moved.
Not much, but enough so that both of them saw it.
“Who is it?” McGuire called out. “Who’s there?”
The scratching sound instantly stopped.
Seconds that seemed to Ed Becker like minutes crept by, and then Bill McGuire, closer to the door than Becker, motioned to the lawyer to stay where he was. Treading so lightly that he created no sound at all, McGuire inched closer to the door. He paused for a moment, then leaped toward the door and hurled it all the way open. There was a loud crash as the door smashed against the wall, then Bill McGuire jumped aside as a raccoon burst through the doorway, raced past Ed Becker, and disappeared up the stairs.
“Jesus.” Ed Becker swore softly, utterly disgusted with himself for the terror he had felt only a moment ago. “Let’s get the damn dresser and get out of here before we both have a heart attack.” Retrieving the hand truck from the landing, he followed Bill McGuire into the room.
The chest of drawers was exactly where it had been on Tuesday afternoon, apparently untouched by anything more sinister than the raccoon.
Five minutes later, with the dresser strapped firmly to the hand truck, they reemerged into the bright morning sunlight to find Oliver Metcalf waiting by the truck. As they loaded it into the back of the pickup without bothering to unstrap it from the hand truck, Oliver eyed the old oak chest.
“You actually want that thing?” he asked as Ed Becker carefully shut the tailgate.
“Wait’ll you see it after I’m done with it,” Becker replied. “You’ll wish you’d kept it yourself.”
Oliver shook his head. “Not me,” he said, his gaze shifting to the Asylum. “As far as I’m concerned, anything that comes out of there should go straight to the dump.”
Ed Becker looked quizzically at him. “Come on, Oliver. It’s only a piece of furniture.”
Oliver Metcalf’s brows arched doubtfully. “Maybe so,” he agreed. “But I still wouldn’t have it in my house.” Then: “You guys want a cup of coffee?”
Becker shook his head. “I promised Bonnie I wouldn’t be gone more than half an hour. Amy’s home from school with sniffles and driving Bonnie crazy. How about a rain check?”
“Anytime,” Oliver said.
Ed Becker and Bill McGuire got into the truck. As they drove away, Oliver caught one last glimpse of the oak dresser that stood in the truck’s bed.
And as the image registered on his brain, a stab of pain slashed through his head.
* * *
The boy stares at the hypodermic needle that sits on the chest, not certain what is about to happen, but still terrified.
The man picks up the needle and comes toward the boy.
Though the boy cowers back, he knows there is no escape. He does his best not to cry out as the man plunges the needle into his arm.
Then blackness closes around him.
By the time the pain in his head had eased and Oliver was able to start back to his house, the truck had disappeared down Amherst Street, as completely as the image had disappeared from Oliver’s memory.
Chapter 2
Rebecca Morrison had no idea where she was, no idea how long she’d been there.
Her last truly clear memory was of awakening from a nightmare to hear terrible noises coming from downstairs. She remembered leaving her little room in the attic, but after that her mind could provide her with only a jumble of images:
Germaine’s room. A broken lamp on the floor. Bright red bloodstains.
More bloodstains on the stairs. On the carpet.
And an arm.
She clearly remembered an arm, sticking out from under the elevator.
Had Miss Clara been in the elevator?
She thought so, but even that wasn’t clear.
She remembered running out into the night—she must have been trying to get help—but after that, everything was a blank.
The next thing she remembered was slowly waking up, not knowing whether she was awake or trapped in a dream of wakefulness.
She’d been cloaked in darkness, plunged into a blackness so deep it had seemed she was drowning in it, unable even to catch her breath. When her mind had cleared enough for her to realize she was not dreaming, was not dying, but was awakening instead in some strange, lightless place, her first terrified thought was that she’d been buried alive.
A wave of panic overwhelmed her. She tried to scream, but all that emerged was a muffled groan that jammed in her throat, causing her to cough and choke.
Taped!
Her mouth was taped, so she couldn’t give vent to the coughing, and for a second it seemed as if her head might actually explode. Finally, though, she’d managed to control the coughing—she still wasn’t sure how.
Slowly—very slowly—her panic had eased, only to give way to something even worse.
The tape wasn’t just over her mouth—it bound her wrists and ankles as well.
She was on a floor—a hard floor, covered with no rugs or carpeting. In the total blackness, she could not judge how large or small the room she was in might be.
A silence as deep as the blackness surrounded her. As time crawled endlessly on, the eerie quiet became as frightening as the dark.
Then the cold began to wrap itself around her.
It was a cold she’d barely noticed when she first came awake. But as the minutes and hours slithered by, and she could neither hear nor see, the cold, her sole companion, edged closer and closer, engulfing her in its clammy arms, slowly invading not only her body
but her spirit as well.
Soon it had seeped into her very bones so her whole body ached. No matter how she tried to writhe away from it, there was no escape.
Sleep became impossible, for whenever exhaustion and terror overcame her, and her mind finally retreated into unconsciousness for a moment or two, the nightmares that thrived on the cold chased after her, torturing her even in her sleep so that when once again she came awake, body and spirit woke even more debilitated than before.
Her sense of time deserted her; day and night had long since lost their meaning.
In the first hours—or perhaps even days—she’d thought she might starve to death. When she first awakened, she had been far too terrified even to think about food or water, but even fear must eventually give way to hunger. At some point the ache induced by the increasing cold had been punctuated by pangs of hunger, stabbings that eventually settled into a dull agony that attacked her mind as efficiently as it ravaged her body.
With the hunger had come thirst, a parching so powerful she thought she would die from it. How long would it take to die? How much longer before hunger, or thirst, or some unnamed evil that would strike from out of the darkness brought deliverance from this unending agony?
The hunger and thirst, and the terror of the darkness, the emptiness, and the nightmares would go on until she finally sank into an oblivion that, she knew, would be welcome once it came.
But until then …
A sob rose in her throat, but she quickly put it down, knowing it would only choke her once it rose high enough. And when she felt hot wetness flooding her eyes, she battled against it, refusing to waste so much as a single drop of water on something as useless as tears.
The very effort required to wrestle against her raging emotions somehow put her terror under control, and after an interminable period of time—Rebecca had no idea how long it might have been—she finally conquered the worst of the demons that had come to her out of the darkness.
Over and over again she told herself that she was still alive, and that soon—very soon—someone would come and rescue her.
But how long would soon be?
There was no way of knowing.
Again, she shook off a demon nightmare brought on by the cold and roused herself from the fitful sleep into which she’d fallen. But the moment she came awake, she knew that something had changed.
Something in the quality of the darkness was different, and she knew with utter certainty that she was no longer alone.
She lay perfectly still, holding every muscle in check, not daring even to breathe as she listened to the silence.
It too had changed.
No longer the empty, eerie silence she had awakened into before, now there seemed to be something—something not-quite-audible—lurking just beyond the range of her hearing.
And her skin was crawling, as if some primeval sixth sense detected watching eyes that her own could not see.
Her heart raced; her pulse throbbed in her ears.
Whatever lurked in the darkness drew closer.
An icy sheen of sweat oozed from Rebecca’s pores, making her skin slick with fear.
And then she felt the touch.
A shriek rose in her throat as something so feather-light as almost not to be there at all brushed against her face, but once again the tape securing her mouth cut off her cry, and her howl of terror was strangled into a whimper.
The touch came again, and then, finally, the silence was broken.
“The beginning. This is only the beginning.” The words were spoken with so little voice that they could have been no more than the whisper of a breeze, but in the silent darkness they echoed and resounded, filling Rebecca once more with indescribable terror.
The voice whispered again.
“Cry out if you want to. No one can hear you. No one would care if they could.”
Then she felt the touch once more.
It was firmer this time, and it instantly brought back a terrible memory.
She had fled the house to get help. She was racing up Amherst Street, intent on getting to Oliver’s house at the very top, just inside the gates to the old Asylum. And suddenly—with no warning—an arm had snaked around her neck and a hand had clamped over her mouth.
A hand, she had realized just before terror overcame her, that was covered in thin latex.
The same thin latex that covered the unseen finger now stroking her cheek.
The tape was ripped from her mouth.
Instinctively, Rebecca opened her mouth to scream, but before even the slightest sound came out, a voice inside her head gave her a warning:
He wants you to scream. He wants to hear your fear.
Exercising the control she had somehow gathered around her during the endless hours of cold and darkness, Rebecca remained utterly silent.
As she had for hours—perhaps days—she waited quietly in the dark.
The silence grew—stretched endlessly on. Though she could hear nothing, Rebecca could sense the growing fury of her tormentor.
She decided she would not give him whatever it was he wanted from her.
Not now.
Not ever.
Finally she spoke.
“You might as well kill me,” she said, somehow managing to keep her voice from quavering even a little bit. “If that’s what you’re going to do, you might as well do it right now.”
Again silence hung in the darkness like an almost palpable mass, but just as Rebecca thought she could stand it no more, the whisper drifted out of the void.
“You’ll wish I had,” it breathed. “Soon you’ll wish I had.”
She’d braced herself then, uncertain what to expect next.
All that happened was that the tape was put back on her mouth, and the hours of silence and darkness began again.
Now and then he came back.
He brought her water.
He brought her food.
He did not speak.
Neither did she.
Slowly, she explored the room in which she was being held, creeping across the floor like some kind of larva, snuffling in the corners with her nose, touching what she could with her fingers, though her wrists were still bound behind her back.
Every surface she touched was cold and smooth.
The room was totally empty.
She no longer knew how many times she had crept around its perimeter and crisscrossed its floor, searching for something—anything—that might tell her where she was.
There was nothing.
Then, a little while ago, the silence had finally been truly broken.
She heard footsteps, and the muffled sound of voices, and for the first time since she’d found herself in the silent blackness, she tried to cry out.
Tried, and failed, frustrated by the thick tape that covered her mouth.
A little later she heard the muffled sounds again, and once more she struggled against the tape, trying to rub it off against the floor, but finding nothing that would catch its edge long enough for her to rip it free.
Then the voices faded away, and the black silence once again closed around her.
Chapter 3
“Go all the way down by the garage,” Ed Becker told Bill McGuire. “My back’s already starting to hurt, and the closer we get to the basement stairs, the better.”
Bill McGuire glanced over at the attorney. “Still got a coal bin? Maybe we could just slide it right on down. At least then it’ll be in the right place when you decide to shove it in the furnace.”
“Very funny,” Becker groused. “But when I’m done, you won’t even recognize it.”
“Exactly my point,” the contractor taunted. He slowed the pickup to a stop about ten feet from the Beckers’ garage, and swung out of the cab just as the back door flew open and Ed’s five-year-old daughter, Amy, came barreling out, closely followed by Riley, a six-month-old Labrador puppy that Amy had managed to convince her parents was “absolutely the only thing I want for
Christmas. If I can just have a puppy, I promise I’ll never ask for anything else again as long as I live so-help-me-God.” While the campaign had worked sufficiently well so that the puppy had, indeed, taken up residence in the Becker house, Amy’s father had yet to overcome the fear of dogs from which he’d suffered since he was his daughter’s age. As the comparatively nonthreatening eight-week-old ball of fluff that Riley had been upon arrival developed into the immensely menacing—at least to Ed Becker—forty-pound medicine-ball-with-feet that Riley now was, Ed had become increasingly wary of his daughter’s pet. Now, as Riley did his best to climb into Ed’s arms and administer one of his specialty soggy face licks, the attorney who had never quailed before the most irate judge or angry client cowered away from the puppy’s enthusiastic onslaught.
“Put him in the house, Amy,” Ed ordered, reaching for authority although his guts seemed to have turned to Jell-O.
“He won’t hurt you, Daddy,” Amy replied with enough scorn to make her father blush. “He’s just being friendly. He loves you!”
“Well, I don’t love him,” Ed muttered, now fending the dog off with both arms.
Riley, yapping happily and utterly unaware of the havoc he was wreaking on Ed’s intestines, kept leaping at Ed’s chest, enjoying the intricacies of this new game.
“Riley, down!” Bonnie Becker commanded as she thrust open the back door and joined the group around the pickup truck. The dog instantly dropped to the ground, though his entire body quivered with barely suppressed excitement as he gazed adoringly up at Ed. “Take him inside, Amy,” Bonnie told her daughter. “Can’t you see he’s scaring your father half to death?”
Ed’s embarrassed flush deepened as his daughter grasped the dog by the collar and began pulling him toward the house. Though the Lab, only a few inches shorter and no lighter than the little girl, could have dug in and refused to go, he happily submitted to his small mistress’s tugging. Child and pet disappeared back into the house, and Ed, his courage fully restored now that the puppy was nowhere to be seen, attempted to recover a little of his dignity. “I am not afraid of him,” he declared. “It’s just that he’s so big, he could hurt someone! He has to learn not to jump all over people!”