The Blackstone Chronicles
But also as in the dream, his body refused to respond to the desires of his mind, and he found himself drawn inexorably into the room and the blackness beyond.
And then he knew.
They were everywhere. They sat in every Victorian chair, perched on every footstool, and leaned against every gateleg table and curio cabinet.
Two of them flanked the fireplace.
He could see at once that they were all dead. Pale, motionless, they somehow managed to stare at him accusingly with their sightless eyes.
Then, the wail. A low keening that slowly built into a cacophony of pain and suffering.
Ed recognized them all, for during the last fifteen years, he had studied photographs of every one of them. They were the victims of his clients, now gathered in his home, come at last to settle their accounts with the man who had defended their killers.
His heart pounding, Ed turned away and lurched toward the front door, only to find himself staring into the empty eyes of his long-dead great-uncle Paul Becker.
“They come for us,” he heard his great-uncle say, though his colorless lips stayed utterly still. “The people we kill. They come for us every night. Now they’ve come for you too.”
A moan escaping his lips, Ed turned and shambled up the stairs. His heart was beating so wildly he felt as if his chest might explode. At the top of the stairs he stopped, his eyes darting around the hall, searching for someplace to hide.
As the sky outside continued to brighten, and the silvery dawn began to seep through the stairwell’s windows, one by one the doors to each of the bedrooms opened.
In silent ranks the victims appeared and came slowly toward him, reaching out to him just as his own specter had reached out to him in the dream.
Instinctively taking a step back, Ed lost his footing. For a moment he teetered on the top step, but then fell backward, a single panicked scream bursting from his throat before his head struck the bare hardwood treads, cutting off his shout.
Rolling over and over, Ed Becker tumbled to the foot of the stairs, to sprawl in a broken heap on the floor of the foyer.
Bonnie Becker raced across the lawn and up onto the porch of their house, throwing the door open so hard that the glass panel in its center cracked. For a split second she saw nothing in the faint light, then caught sight of her husband’s body lying at the foot of the stairs. “Ed!” she screamed. “Oh my God! Ed!” Dropping to her knees, she was about to gather him into her arms when she saw the strange angle at which his head lay, and knew his neck was broken.
Don’t touch him! she told herself. Don’t touch him. Just call for help.
Her entire body shaking, she managed to get to her feet and stumble to the phone.
Picking up the receiver, she jabbed at the keypad, her hand trembling so badly she couldn’t even be certain she had punched the right buttons. But on the second ring the 911 operator answered. Moments later, as she heard the sound of sirens screaming toward her house for the second time that night, Bonnie gazed numbly around the room.
It was exactly as they had left it.
Nothing had changed; nothing was different.
Yet as Bonnie went back into the foyer to watch over her husband until the ambulance came, she knew that despite her own words to the contrary, somehow—in some way she was certain she would never understand—another of Ed’s nightmares had come true.
Chapter 10
The first copy of next week’s Blackstone Chronicle lay on Oliver Metcalf’s desk. Though Lois Martin had put it in front of him nearly an hour earlier, he had not yet touched it. Instead, he’d simply stared at the headline—a headline he himself had written—and wondered if he could, in good conscience, let the paper be distributed the way it stood, or whether he should try to recover every copy that had been printed, destroy them, and start all over again. He was no closer to an answer now than he had been an hour ago. Yet the headline—together with its accompanying story—would not release its grip on him.
Local Attorney Injured in Fall
In the latest in a series of apparently coincidental tragedies, Blackstone attorney Edward Becker was seriously injured in a fall at his home early Sunday morning. The house on Amherst Street had been the site of a gas explosion several hours earlier, in which no one was hurt, and Becker, 40, his wife, Bonnie, 38, and their 5-year-old daughter, Amy, had evacuated the house.
According to Mrs. Becker, the lawyer returned to the house despite the possibility that it wasn’t safe, and apparently stumbled at the top of the stairs. Fire Chief Larry Schulze states that both the gas and electricity to the house had been cut off for safety reasons. “I don’t have any idea why Ed went back before dawn,” Schulze said in an interview with this newspaper.
Suffering breaks in three vertebrae, Becker …
The rest of the story disappeared under the fold of the paper, but it didn’t really matter: every word of it was etched in Oliver’s mind.
Every not-quite-true word.
He’d spent two hours talking to Bonnie Becker at the hospital the morning after Ed had fallen, listening to her strange story of Ed’s growing conviction that his dreams were somehow coming true, and how she’d awakened sometime before dawn to find him gone and had rushed across the street to discover the accident.
She’d also talked of a stereoscope that they found in the dresser Ed had taken out of the Asylum Friday morning.
Bonnie, exhausted and red-eyed, had looked at Oliver bleakly. “I know it’s crazy, but I keep remembering the gifts people are talking about.…” Her voice trailed off, and then she shook her head. “Forget I said that, Oliver. What happened to Ed was an accident. It didn’t have anything to do with the dresser, or the stereoscope, or anything else.”
But Oliver had known even as she spoke that Bonnie didn’t quite believe her own words. Nor did he. Yet when he sat down to write the story, he decided to “forget” the ruminations, as Bonnie had requested. No sense setting more tongues to wagging than already were.
And there was, of course, no proof.
No proof that the tragedies that had befallen the McGuires and the Hartwicks, Martha Ward and Germaine Wagner, and now Ed Becker were connected in any way. There wasn’t—couldn’t be—any connection between Rebecca’s disappearance and Ed Becker’s near-fatal accident. Yet Oliver couldn’t help wondering. Still, despite his own doubts, despite the disturbing way his heart seemed to lurch in his chest every time he thought about Rebecca, it would be irresponsible to fan the fires of speculation. No point making people more frightened than they already were.
But Oliver Metcalf was frightened. Frightened nearly to death.
As the deepest shadows of night crept through the empty rooms of the cold stone building, the dark figure slipped one more time into the hidden chamber in which his treasures were stored. He didn’t linger tonight, for already the hour was late and there was much to do. Lifting a shallow, oblong box from the topmost shelf, he wiped it clean of the thick layer of dust that had settled over it, then released its latches and carefully opened it.
With latex-covered fingers, he removed a tortoiseshell object from the box’s velvet-lined interior and held it lovingly up to the few rays of moonlight that filtered through the window.
Its blade glittered brightly. So brightly, it almost seemed new. In the dimness of the light, he could only barely see the blood with which it was stained.
To be continued …
PART 6
ASYLUM
Prelude
Night lay over Blackstone like a heavy, suffocating shroud, but it was not merely the darkness that had driven the town’s citizens from Main and Elm Streets, from the locked and shuttered library and the cozy camaraderie of the Red Hen.
Fear, as well as night, now held the people of Blackstone in its clutches. Terror had spread through the village like a virus, infecting first one person, and then another, until at last no one had escaped its icy touch.
Every night when they locked their door
s, the people of Blackstone prayed that this would not be the night when evil came to prey on them. If it had to feed, let it find succor within someone else’s walls, destroy the lives of someone else’s family.
The fever of fear was no longer limited to the hours of darkness, for even in the bright sunshine of a springtime afternoon, there wasn’t a soul in Blackstone who couldn’t feel his neighbors’ eyes watching. Watching, and wondering.
Who would be next?
And how would it come?
The universal custom of hpnoring birthdays and anniversaries with gifts had abruptly stopped in Blackstone, for everyone in town had heard that any object, even the most innocent-seeming gift, could carry the curse—a doll, a handkerchief, a silver locket—anything could bring home the reign of terror.
The flea market had been abandoned, for everyone had heard about the dragon-shaped lighter that Rebecca Morrison had given to her cousin. Janice Anderson hadn’t seen a customer in a week. The post office had begun returning packages of every description to their senders, all of them marked with the same message: DELIVERY REFUSED.
Every day the tension grew, and soon families who had been neighbors and friends for more generations than they could remember were looking at one another with undisguised suspicion. But it was at night that nerves jumped and heartbeats hammered, at night when everyone retreated to their homes and tried to bar their doors against fear. Behind their locks and barricades they knew precautions were useless, of course, for deep in their souls, each of them understood that if the madness came to invade his home, no locks would keep it out, no shutters hold it at bay.
It would slither in through the crevices and cracks, and by morning—
But none of them wanted to think about morning.
Just to get through the night was enough.
And this night—a night filled with moonless blackness made palpable by heavy fog—was the worst of all. On most other nights the people of Blackstone had been able to peek from their windows, searching the pools of light around the street lamps for signs of danger.
Tonight there was only darkness, and the viscous mist that turned keen eyes blind.
Through the fog and darkness a single figure moved, slipping unseen from the door of the Asylum, its cloak thrown loose around its shoulders. It drifted through the ebony night with wraithlike grace, a presence that crept from house to house.
In every house, the figure caught a glimpse of terror as it peered unseen through a forgotten shade or slightly parted curtain with a perfect, sinuous stealth that never betrayed its presence for an instant. The watcher could almost smell the fear, and shivers of excitement ran over its skin like a lover’s fingers. Moving, silently stalking. A shadow that briefly crossed from one window to the next. Savoring the suffering. Delighting in the disease it had unleashed upon the town.
It was close to dawn when finally the triumphal tour was near an end, and the figure came to the house upon whose step it would leave its most important gift.
At this house, the figure lingered long, gazing up at the darkened windows from which no light spilled. There was no movement within, nor was there the scent of fear that issued from every other house it had visited. As the cloaked intruder circled this house, rage began to build inside it, until, reflecting upon the vengeance this gift would wreak upon this house’s only occupant, the fury slowly ebbed away, leaving in its place a shiver of strangely erotic excitement.
Soon, soon, the wrath would descend upon this place too.
Caressing the gift one last time, the dark figure laid it lovingly at the front door, then faded into the blackness as silently as it had come.
Chapter 1
Numb.
Every part of Rebecca Morrison seemed to have gone numb.
A chill had crept over her that she’d never experienced before. She had always known what it felt like to be cold, of course, for growing up in New Hampshire meant winters wading through snowbanks and temperatures that sank far below zero. When she was a little girl, she loved those days. Her mother would bundle her up in a thick woolen snowsuit, and put mittens on her hands and a stocking cap on her head, and Rebecca would hurl herself into the snowy paradise outside with an excitement that sometimes made her feel like she would simply burst with joy. She would flop down into the snow, wave her arms and spread her legs, then jump up to admire the angel she had made. Sometimes she’d even leap right into a big drift and bury her face in the cold white cottony fluff because the frozen, wet purity was so refreshing, its aftertingle so deliciously shivery. Best of all were “snow days,” when school was closed, grownups stayed inside their warm kitchens, and she would go off in search of other kids to play with. Inevitably, she’d wind up in a snowball fight that—inevitably—required her to shed her mittens since everyone knew you couldn’t make a proper snowball with mittens on. By the time the grown-ups came to chase everyone inside, Rebecca’s fingers would be freezing, and snow would have worked its way inside her sleeves as well. The cold she’d felt then had been an exciting cold, a happy, carefree cold that always vanished deliciously with a cup of hot cocoa covered with marshmallows, sipped in front of the fire blazing in the living room hearth of her parents’ house on Maple Street.
There had been other kinds of cold, though, that hadn’t been nearly as much fun.
The cold she’d felt when there weren’t enough blankets on the bed and Aunt Martha turned the thermostat low, to save money and save Rebecca’s “spendthrift soul.”
The icy cold of the first dip into the quarry in spring, when the water was barely above freezing.
The clammy chill when she’d gotten caught in a rainstorm with neither raincoat nor umbrella to protect her from getting soaked through to the skin.
That kind of cold, though, could be banished with an extra comforter, or a thick terry-cloth towel, or a change into dry clothes.
Even the chill of a fever that could rattle her teeth and turn her skin clammy was nothing like what she was feeling now, for even when she’d been in a fever’s grip, she always knew it was only a temporary thing, that in a few hours, perhaps even a day, it would pass and she would feel warm again.
The cold she felt now had crept up on her so slowly that she couldn’t really remember when it began; indeed, it was as if it had always been there. Every part of her body either had gone so numb that she had no feeling at all or ached with a dull pain, an ache that had burrowed into every muscle, spread through every bone. She wasn’t frozen; she knew that. She could still move her arms and legs, still twist her neck and flex her back. But every movement was agonizing, every twitch of every muscle over which she had managed to retain control brought her a new sensation of pain.
The cold had even seeped into her mind, slowing her wits and confusing her so badly that she was no longer sure when she was awake and when she was sleeping; could not determine which of the sensations she felt were real, and which were the products of the dark nightmares that seized her whenever she slept.
It was the cold of death.
Rebecca knew that, knew it with a strange certainty that had grown in her mind until she’d all but given up any hope of surviving the ordeal that began when she’d fled from Germaine Wagner’s house.
How long had it been?
She had no idea, for time itself no longer meant anything to her.
Not only was there no longer any distinction between night and day, but the difference between a minute and an hour, a day and a week, a month and a year, had disappeared. An hour might be a lifetime, and a month no more than a minute.
It didn’t matter, for in the world into which Rebecca had plummeted—if it was this world at all—there was no longer any time.
Only cold.
The cold of the grave.
There were times when she thought she must have died, when the darkness around her was so deep that she knew she must be buried in the earth. But then some brief sensation would penetrate the numbing cold; a sound perhaps, or a sharp twing
e of pain that would rouse her, however briefly, from the strange not-quite-sleep into which she’d sunk.
For a while she tried to keep track of the passing time, tried to count the seconds that had turned into small eternities, but even that had become impossible, for there was no way to remember how many seconds she’d counted, no way to mark the passing minutes and hours.
The Tormentor—that was how she thought of her captor now, as almost an abstraction of a being, rather than a man with a face hidden by darkness and a personality concealed by silence. The Tormentor came and went, and Rebecca had long since ceased to feel any reaction to him.
Not surprise.
Not terror.
Not even apprehension anymore.
At first, in a time grown dim and distant in her memory, she had feared his coming, her heart pounding when she heard his scraping step or even sensed his presence when no sound betrayed that he was there.
He brought her food and water, though, for which she was grateful, though his whispered words made her flesh crawl no less than did his touch. But as the cold had tunneled deeper within her mind and her body and her spirit, Rebecca even stopped thinking about what it might be that he wanted from her, what reason he might have had for bringing her here.
Now, as her mind rose slowly out of the black pit of sleep, and the cold-induced nightmares loosened their grip, she sensed that he was there once more. It was nothing in the darkness that betrayed his presence; no sound of footsteps or rasping breath, no whispered words murmured in her ear, no touch of gloved fingers on her flesh.
Only a sense that she was not alone.
Then there was a minute lessening of the darkness, and like a flower turning toward the sun, she found herself turning her head, an involuntary groping for the source of the faint brightening that slightly grayed her world of darkness.