The Blackstone Chronicles (52 page)

Megan’s eyes closed and she said nothing else, but for a long time Amy lay awake. She stared at the doll. In the dim light from the street lamp outside, it almost seemed to be sleeping. But Megan’s words kept echoing in her mind.

She didn’t try to touch the doll again.

*  *  *

“It happened again.”

Ed and Bonnie were in the McGuire guest room. Bonnie was already in bed, and Ed was standing at the window, gazing out at the house across the street and one lot down the slope. His house. His sanctuary, meant to provide shelter from the storms of daily life as much as from winter’s icy blasts. In the last twenty-four hours his refuge had become instead a place where his nightmares came true.

“What happened?” Bonnie asked, though her heart was beating faster in anticipation of his reply.

“I dreamed it.” Ed turned away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. In the shadowy darkness of the room, he told her about the dream he’d had, and what he’d seen in the basement only a little while ago, when he and Larry Schulze had gone down to assess the damage.

“But it wasn’t a gunshot,” Bonnie insisted when Ed was finished. “And it wasn’t blood. It was
paint
, Ed. It was just a can of paint whose lid got knocked off in the explosion.”

“But—”

“But darling, it really
was
just a dream.” Feeling utterly exhausted as the remembered terror of the explosion closed in on her, she said softly, “It will all seem different in the morning. Can’t we talk about it then? Please?”

Ed hesitated, but as Bonnie held her arms out to him, he slipped into bed beside her, holding her close. She was right, he decided as he kissed her gently. In the bright light of day, none of it would seem so terrible. And, in truth, there had been no permanent damage, nothing they wouldn’t easily recover from. Tomorrow they’d look for a new puppy for Amy, and with a couple hours’ work the
mess in the basement would disappear as completely as if the explosion had never happened. Bill McGuire had already promised to put in an automatic detection system to guard them against another accident. In a few days everything would be back to normal. As he felt Bonnie’s breathing drift into the gentle rhythm of sleep, Ed Becker closed his eyes, yielding to oblivion.

Ed stood on the sidewalk, staring at the house.

Around him the night had become eerily quiet, as if the explosion had silenced every living thing in Blackstone.

Ed knew he should turn around and go back to Bill McGuire’s house, slip back into bed with Bonnie, and let himself surrender to sleep. Instead, he moved toward the house, irresistibly drawn inside.

His house—yet not his house.

In the living room, all the furniture he and Bonnie had brought with them from Boston was gone, and the heavy Victorian decorations from the long-ago days when his grandmother had lived here were all back in place. The room looked exactly as it had when he’d viewed the picture in the stereoscope. The stereoscope itself sat on a mahogany gateleg table upon which a lace cloth had been spread. Moving closer to the table, Ed lifted the cloth and ran his fingers appreciatively over the perfect satin finish. There was a drawer at one end of the table, and Ed’s hands closed on its pull. He hesitated, remembering the carnage let loose when, in his dream, he’d pulled open the drawers of the oak chest from the Asylum. Yet even as his mind cried out against temptation, Ed’s trembling fingers slid the drawer open.

He found himself gazing at a .38 caliber pistol.

The pistol was clutched by a hand hacked off at the wrist, blood dripping from its severed veins.

Shuddering, he slammed the drawer shut. He stood still, waiting for the sick feeling in his stomach to pass.

It was not there, he told himself. I only imagined it.

But he didn’t try to open the drawer again, instead dropping the tablecloth back in place to conceal the drawer, to make it disappear.

He left the living room and moved into the dining room. A gleaming cherry-wood table surrounded by eight armchairs stood where only a few hours before his own teak table had been. Against the wall a Victorian break-front was filled with Limoges china in an ornate pattern of royal blue and gold. On one shelf three dozen heavy crystal goblets glittered in the dim light.

He reached for a glass. As he took it, it filled with blood.

Dropping it, Ed spun around. The table, bare only a moment ago, was set now as if for a feast. Twin candelabra, each of them glowing with a dozen candles, cast a warm glow over an elegant display of silver and crystal.

At each place, a serving plate had been set, and on each plate there was a single object.

The severed heads of eight of Ed Becker’s clients stared at him with empty eyes. Their lips were stretched back from their teeth in grim parodies of smiles, and pools of blood filled the plates upon which they sat.

“No!”
The word caught in his throat and emerged only as a strangled grunt. Backing out of the dining room, he turned to flee, but instead of taking him out of the house, his legs carried him up the stairs until he stood at the door to the master bedroom. His heart pounded. He tried to make himself turn away from the closed door, to go back down the stairs, to leave the house.

Powerless to stop himself, he reached out and pushed the door open. As it swung back on its hinges, the room was revealed, not as the cheerful sunshine yellow space Bonnie had made it, but as a dark chamber dominated by
an ornate four-poster bed, its curtains drawn back to reveal a heavy brocade coverlet.

Then he saw the figure of the man.

He recognized it instantly, for its face was bathed in silvery light pouring in from the window.

Ed Becker was staring at himself.

And he was hanging, broken-necked, from the chandelier. The hands of the lifeless corpse reached out as if to grasp the living man and draw him too into the cold grip of death.

A scream of horror rose from Ed Becker’s lungs, boiling out of him, echoing through the room, shattering the night.

F
or a second Ed Becker didn’t know where he was. His mind still half entangled in the nightmare, he tried to twist away from the clawlike grasp of the dream. The terrible vision remained before him; he could still hear his own howling scream. Beside him, though, Bonnie slept quietly. As he sat up, willing his heartbeat to slow, his thoughts to focus, she sighed and snuggled deeper into the quilt, but did not wake.

Imagination. These hideous images were merely the product of mental stress—the culmination of months of anxiety over the awful tragedies among his friends, his worries over the fate of the Blackstone Center, capped by the close call they’d had tonight.

Imagination—overwrought and out of control.

Ed got out of bed and went to the window, where he could just make out the silhouette of his house against the starlit darkness of the sky. “It really was just a dream,” he said quietly, repeating his wife’s comforting words to himself like a mantra.
A dream. Just a dream
.

But he knew he didn’t believe it.

Knew he had to see for himself.

Even as he opened the front door, he could sense that something had changed.

Everything about the house was different.

The way it smelled.

The way it felt.

He reached for the light switch, remembering the power had been turned off only when there was no response to his touch. Making his way through the foyer, he came to the dining room door. Though it was almost pitch-black, he could see the vague outline of a table and chairs.

Big, heavy furniture, unlike the teak set he and Bonnie had brought with them from Boston.

An illusion!

It had to be an illusion, born of the darkness and the memory of the dream. But then, as he remembered the vision of his clients’ severed heads displayed on the table, he backed away from the dining room. Crossing the threshold into the living room, he stopped.

The room was not empty.

He could feel the presence of someone—or
something—
waiting in the space that yawned before him. As in the dream, he tried to turn away and leave the house.

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.

T
he 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.