The Blackstone Chronicles

  A boy is tied down to a bed.

  His hands are tied, his ankles are strapped.

  Across his torso, a shadow falls.

  The boy is screaming ….

  Blinking, and shaking his head, Oliver quickly flipped back through the pages, searching for the picture.

  Only there was no such picture in the book.

  Chapter 4

  As he had often done before, Bill McGuire paused on the sidewalk in front of his house for no better reason than to gaze in satisfaction upon the structure in which he’d spent almost all his life. The house was a Victorian—the only one on this particular block of Amherst Street—and though Bill was perfectly well aware of the current fashion of turning houses such as his into pink, purple, or lavender Painted Ladies, neither he nor Elizabeth had ever been tempted to coat the old house with half a dozen colors of paint. Instead, they had faithfully maintained the earthy tones—mustards, tans, greens, and maroons—of the period, and the elaborate white trim, meant by the original builders to resemble lace that gave the house a feeling of lightness, despite its mass.

  The house was one of only six on the block, and all of them had been as well taken care of as the McGuires’ Amherst Street, which sloped gently up the hill, eventually turning to the left, then back to the right, and finally ending at the gates of the old Asylum, could easily have been set aside as a sort of living museum of architecture. There was a large half-timbered Tudor on one side of the McGuires’, and a good example of Federal on the other. On the opposite side of the street were two houses that had been built early in the Craftsman era, separated by a large saltbox that, to Bill at least, appeared slightly embarrassed by the Victorian effusiveness of its across-the-street neighbor. Still, all six houses sat on spacious enough grounds and were surrounded by so many trees and shrubs that the block was unified by its parklike look, if not its architecture.

  Today, though, as he gazed up at his house, with its profusion of steeply pitched roofs and dormer windows, Bill had a strange sense that something was not right. He searched the structure for some clue to his uneasiness, but could see nothing wrong. The paint wasn’t peeling, nor were any shingles missing. He quickly scanned the ornate trim work that he’d always taken special pride in keeping in perfect repair, but every bit of it looked exactly as it should. Not a spindle missing, nor a lath either split or broken. Telling himself his discomfort was nothing more than his own bad mood after the meeting at the bank, Bill strode up the brick pathway, mounted the steps that led to the high front porch, and went inside.

  The sense that something was wrong grew stronger.

  “Elizabeth?” he called out. “Megan? Anybody home?” For a moment he heard nothing at all, then the door leading to the butler’s pantry at the far end of the dining room opened and he saw Mrs. Goodrich’s stooped form shuffling toward him.

  “They’re both upstairs,” the old woman said. “You might want to go up and talk to the missus. I think she might be a little upset. And I’m fixing some lunch for the whole family.” The old woman, who had been with Elizabeth since she was a child in Port Arbello, gazed at him worriedly. “You’ll be here, won’t you?”

  “I’ll be here, Mrs. Goodrich,” he assured her. As the housekeeper made her slow way back to the kitchen, Bill started up the stairs. Before he was even halfway to the second-floor landing, Megan appeared, gazing down at him with dark, uncertain eyes.

  “Why can’t I have my dolly?” she demanded. “Why won’t Mommy give her to me?”

  “Dolly?” Bill repeated. “What dolly are you talking about?”

  “The one someone sent me,” Megan said. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Mommy won’t let me have her.”

  At that moment Elizabeth, still dressed in the nightgown and robe she’d been wearing when Bill left the house three hours earlier, appeared behind their daughter, smiling wanly. “Honey, it’s not that I won’t let you have the doll. It’s just that we don’t know who it’s for.”

  “Would one of you mind enlightening me about what’s going on?” Bill asked as he came to the top of the stairs. He knelt down to give Megan a kiss, then stood and slid his arm around his wife. The smile his kiss had put on Megan’s face disappeared.

  “It’s for me!” she declared. “When you see it, you’ll know.”

  “Come on,” Elizabeth said. “It’s in our room. I’ll show it to you.”

  With Megan reaching up to put her hand in his, Bill followed his wife into the big master bedroom. On the old chaise longue, once his mother’s favorite place to sit and read, was the box the mailman had delivered this morning. Reaching into it, Elizabeth lifted out the doll, automatically cradling it in her arms as if it were a baby. “It’s really very beautiful,” she said as Bill moved closer to her. “I think its face must be hand-painted, and the clothes look like they were handmade too.”

  Bill looked down into the doll’s face, which had been painted so perfectly that for the briefest of moments he almost had the feeling the doll was looking back up at him. “Who on earth sent it?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “That’s the problem. Not only wasn’t there any return address, but there wasn’t any card with it either.”

  “It’s mine!” Megan piped, reaching up for the doll. “Why would anybody send a doll to a grown-up?”

  Elizabeth, seeming to hold the doll a little closer to her breast, turned away from the little girl. “But we don’t know that it was sent to you, darling. It might be a present for the new baby.”

  Megan scowled deeply and her chin began to tremble. “But the baby’s going to be a boy,” she said. “You said so. And boys don’t play with dollies!”

  “We hope the baby is going to be a boy,” Elizabeth explained. “But we don’t know. And if you have a little sister, don’t you think she’ll love the doll as much as you do?”

  Megan’s features took on a look of intransigence that almost made Bill laugh. “No,” she declared. “Babies don’t even play with dolls. All they do is eat and cry and wet their diapers.” She turned to her father, and her eyes opened wide. “Please, Daddy, can’t I have her?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Bill said. “Why don’t we put the doll away for a while and see if we can find out who sent it? Then, if it turns out it was meant for you, it’ll be yours. And if it turns out it was meant for the baby, we’ll wait until the baby is born, and if it’s a little boy, then the doll can be your first present from your little brother. How does that sound?”

  Megan looked uncertain. “Where are we going to put her?”

  Bill thought for a moment. “What about the hall closet, downstairs?”

  Megan brightened. “All right,” she agreed. “But I get to carry her downstairs.”

  “Sounds fair enough,” Bill agreed. He winked at Elizabeth. “After all, you’ve gotten to have it all morning. Don’t you think it’s only fair that Megan should get to carry it?”

  For a moment he almost thought he saw hesitation in his wife’s eyes, as if she wasn’t quite ready to give up the doll, but then she smiled. “Of course,” she agreed. She knelt down and handed the doll to Megan. “But you have to cradle it, just like I did. Even though it’s not a real baby, you could hurt it if you dropped it, and it’s very valuable.”

  “I won’t drop her,” Megan declared, holding the antique doll close to her chest just the way her mother had a moment earlier. “I love her.”

  Together, the family went downstairs and opened the hall closet. “She’ll get cold in here,” Megan said. “We have to wrap her in a blanket.” She darted back up the stairs, returning a minute later with the small pink blanket that had first been in her crib, and since then at the foot of her bed. “She can use this,” she said, carefully wrapping the doll in the blanket. Then she surrendered it to her father, who put it up on the shelf, nested among the woolen ski caps, gloves, and scarves.

  “There,” he said. “Now she’ll sleep until we find out who she belongs to.” But as they moved toward the dining
room, where Mrs. Goodrich was putting their lunch on the table, he saw Megan turn back to look longingly at the closet.

  He had a suspicion that before the afternoon was over, the doll would somehow have found its way from the closet to his daughter’s room.

  That, however, would be something Elizabeth would have to deal with, since he himself would be in Port Arbello.

  “Do you really have to go?” Elizabeth asked when he told her what had happened at the bank that morning and what he had to do now.

  “If we want to eat, I do. I’m pretty sure I can still get the job. But I’m probably going to have to hole up in a motel for the night, putting together numbers so I can nail it down in the morning.” He glanced at his wife’s swollen belly, which seemed—impossibly—to have grown even larger just in the few hours he’d been gone. “Will you be all right?”

  “I have a whole month yet before he’s due,” Elizabeth said, instantly reading his thoughts. “Believe me, I’m not going to deliver early just because you’re out of town. So go, do what you have to do, and don’t worry about Megan and me. Mrs. Goodrich has been taking care of me all my life. She can do it one more night.”

  “Mrs. Goodrich is almost ninety,” Bill reminded her.

  “She shouldn’t even be working.”

  “Try telling her that,” Elizabeth replied, laughing. “She’ll eat you for supper!”

  An hour later, when he was ready to take his overnight bag and portable computer out to the car, Bill’s earlier uneasiness returned. “Maybe I better not go,” he said. “Maybe I can do it all over the phone.”

  “You know you can’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Go on! Nothing’s going to happen to us.”

  But even as he drove away from the house, Bill found himself looking back at it.

  Looking back, and still feeling that something was wrong.

  Chapter 5

  Elizabeth was holding her baby—a perfect, tiny boy—cradling him gently against her breast. She was sitting on the porch, in a rocking chair, but it wasn’t the porch of the house in Blackstone, nor, oddly, was the day nearly as cold as it should have been, with Christmas only three weeks away.

  The summer mists seemed to part, and she realized where she was—back home in Port Arbello, on the porch of the old house on Conger’s Point, and it was a perfect July day. A cool wind was blowing in off the sea, and the sound of surf breaking against the base of the bluff was lulling her baby into a contented sleep. She began humming softly, just loud enough so her baby could hear her, but quietly enough not to disturb him.

  “Rockabye baby,

  In the tree tops,

  When the wind blows,

  The cradle will rock …”

  The words died away to nothing more than a murmuring hum, and Elizabeth began to feel drowsy, her eyelids heavy. But then, just as the song faded completely from her lips, a movement caught her eye.

  A child was emerging from the woods across the field.

  Megan.

  Elizabeth was about to call out to her daughter, but as the child grew closer, she realized this little girl wasn’t blond, sunny Megan at all.

  It was her sister.

  It was Sarah!

  But that wasn’t possible, for Sarah looked no older now than she had on that day so many years ago when she’d been taken away to the hospital.

  Yet as the little girl drew closer, walking steadily across the field, directly toward her, Elizabeth felt a terrible chill.

  Sarah was carrying something cradled in her arms. She was holding it out now, offering it to her, and Elizabeth recognized it instantly.

  An arm.

  Jimmy Tyler’s arm …

  Reflexively, Elizabeth looked down at her baby.

  Her son was no longer sleeping. Instead, his eyes were wide open, and he was screaming, though no sound came out of his mouth. But worse than the silent scream, worse than the terror in the infant’s eyes, was the blood spurting from her child’s left shoulder, where the arm had been hacked away.

  Elizabeth felt a scream rise from her lungs, but at the same time a terrible constriction closed her throat, and her howl of anguish stayed trapped within her, filling her up, making her feel as if she might explode into a million fragmented pieces. There was blood everywhere now, and Sarah, still holding the bloody arm that had been torn from the baby’s body, was drawing closer and closer.

  Elizabeth tried to turn away; could not. Finally, with an effort that seemed to sap every ounce of her energy, she hurled herself out of the chair and—

  Elizabeth jerked awake. For an instant the terrible vision still hung before her. Her heart was pounding and she was gasping for breath. But as the dream quickly retreated, and as the hammering of her heart eased and her breathing returned to normal, she realized she wasn’t back in Port Arbello at all.

  She was in her room in Blackstone, on a December afternoon, and her baby was still safe in her womb. Yet, as if from a great distance, she once again heard the lullaby she had been crooning in the dream.

  “When the bough breaks,

  The cradle will fall,

  And down will go baby,

  Cradle and all …”

  Elizabeth rose from the chaise on which she’d been sleeping and stepped out into the hall. The lullaby was louder now, and coming from Megan’s room. Moving silently down the wide corridor that ran two-thirds of the length of the second floor, Elizabeth paused outside her daughter’s door and listened.

  She could still hear Megan, humming softly.

  As she herself had been humming.

  She opened the door a crack and peered inside.

  Megan was sitting on her bed.

  She was cradling the antique doll in her arms.

  Elizabeth pushed the door wide. The lullaby died on Megan’s lips as her eyes widened in surprise. Her arms tightened reflexively, pressing the doll close to her chest.

  Elizabeth crossed the room until she was standing over her daughter. “We decided the doll would stay in the closet, didn’t we?”

  Megan shook her head. “You decided,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “We all decided,” Elizabeth told her. “Daddy, and Mommy, and you. So I’m going to put the doll away again. Do you understand?”

  “But I want her,” Megan protested. “I love her.”

  Reaching down, Elizabeth took the doll from her daughter. “She’s not yours to love, Megan. Not yet. Perhaps someday, perhaps even someday soon. But not now. I’m putting it back in the closet,” she said. “And you’re not to touch it again. Do you understand?”

  Megan looked up, saying nothing as Elizabeth left the room and closed the door. For a moment Megan felt hot tears flood her eyes. Then she realized: It didn’t matter where her mother hid the doll. She would find it, and it would be hers.

  Elizabeth carried the doll back downstairs and was about to put it back in the closet when she changed her mind. The closet would be the first place Megan would look. Leaving the hall, she went through the arched entry into the living room, then beyond it, in the library, saw the perfect place to put the doll: the top shelf of one of the pair of mahogany cases Bill had built to stand on either side of the fireplace.

  The top shelf—one she could barely reach herself—was empty. Even if Megan spotted the doll up there, she wouldn’t be able to get to it without a ladder. Positioning the doll as far back on the shelf as she could, Elizabeth was about to leave the library and return upstairs when her eyes fell on a portrait.

  Along with the treasured books Elizabeth had brought with her from Port Arbello, there were framed pictures of her family and Bill’s, and even an old Ouija board she and Sarah had played with when they were children. The portrait to which her eyes had been drawn was of one of Bill’s aunts—the one named Laurette, Elizabeth dimly remembered, who had killed herself long before Bill had been born. Though Elizabeth had seen the portrait dozens of times before, this time something about it caught her eye. She stared at it, trying to understand
what had captured her attention. Then her eyes returned to the doll that now sat on the top shelf of the mahogany case.

  There was an odd resemblance between the doll and the woman in the portrait, Elizabeth realized.

  The same blue eyes.

  The same long blond hair.

  The same pink cheeks and red lips.

  It was as if the doll were a miniature version of the woman in the painting.

  A thought flitted through Elizabeth’s mind. Could it be possible that the doll had actually been modeled on this woman? Perhaps even been owned by her? As quickly as the thought came, Elizabeth dismissed it.

  Going back upstairs, she stretched out on the chaise once more, and this time, when she slept, she didn’t dream.

  Megan McGuire’s eyes opened in the darkness. For a moment she was startled, unsure what had awakened her, but then, on the far wall of her bedroom, she saw a shape.

  The shape of a witch, inky black, with pointed hat and flowing gown, astride a long broomstick. In her hand—held high aloft—she grasped a sword.

  The witch was moving now, flying higher, moving up toward the ceiling, hurtling through the air, then down toward Megan.

  The little girl shrank into her pillow, pulling the covers tight around her neck as a shiver of fear passed through her.

  Closer and closer the witch came, sword brandished.

  Megan pressed deeper into the pillow.

  Then, just as Megan could feel the first tingling of the sorceress’s touch, the apparition vanished as suddenly as it had come, snatched away by an enormous flash of light.

  As she always did, Megan lay still for a moment, savoring the delicious thrill that the shadow always gave her, even though she knew perfectly well that the soaring witch was no more than a momentary vision produced by a car driving up Amherst Street, then vanquished by its headlights the instant the car passed by the house.

  The room returned to its familiar shape as the sound of the car faded away, but as Megan released her grip on the blanket that covered her, she heard something else.