The Blackstone Chronicles (37 page)

O
liver Metcalf wasn’t sure exactly what it was about the file that caught his eye. He hadn’t really been thinking about what he was doing; indeed, more of his attention had been focused on his growing concern about Germaine Wagner’s influence over Rebecca Morrison than on the task of packing the old files he’d brought down from the attic back into their box. Yet the moment he’d picked up the faded folder he was now holding, he knew there was something different about it.

The folder itself was made of the same buff manila paper as all the others, mottled with age, its edges softened and fraying. The tab on the edge showed a discoloration where the identifying sticker had once been glued, but the label had long ago fallen away.

Dropping onto the straight-backed chair that he had positioned next to the guest room’s single window, Oliver opened the file. As he scanned its first page, he felt the pangs of a headache coming on. Absently, he rubbed his fingers against his temple, as if hoping to massage the pain away before it took root, and focused on the handwritten notes.

The first page bore nothing more than the patient’s vital statistics. Her name—Lavinia Willoughby—meant nothing to Oliver, and her home had been someplace in South Carolina called Devereaux. Complaining of depression, she had been brought to the Asylum by her husband, and was admitted in 1948.

According to the record, she had died in the Asylum four years later.

The year Oliver was born.

As he began reading Lavinia Willoughby’s case history, Oliver unconsciously pressed the fingers of his right hand harder against his temple, which was starting to throb with pain. Mrs. Willoughby was diagnosed as manic-depressive, and the treatment prescribed for her had been typical of her time. There had been some counseling, with a great deal of emphasis put on her relationship with her father. As her counseling progressed, it became clear that Lavinia’s doctor had concluded that there had been an incestuous relationship between Lavinia and her father.

Lavinia Willoughby, though, had apparently not agreed with the doctor, for there was a notation on the same page that the patient was “in denial and refusing to deal with the possibility.”

A few pages further on, the doctor began exploring the suggestion that Lavinia herself had initiated the incestuous relationship, though it was duly noted that the patient also denied that possibility. After that session, the doctor prescribed hydrotherapy for his patient.

Oliver’s headache spread from his right temple to the back of his head as he read the account of Lavinia Willoughby’s three sessions in the hydrotherapy room. The first one had lasted an hour, after which the patient developed “pneumonia unrelated to her therapy session.” When she had recovered from her illness, her therapy resumed, and after the third session, in which she’d been immersed in cold water for three hours, her therapy had proved successful. The next day, in her regular counseling session, Lavinia Willoughby had remembered that her father had, indeed, molested her when she was a small child.

Looking up from the file as the afternoon light began to fade, Oliver’s eyes moved to the looming form of the
Asylum atop the hill. Its gray walls seemed almost prisonlike this afternoon, and though neither the room nor the day was cold, Oliver found himself shivering as he imagined what incarceration there must have been like for Lavinia Willoughby. He scanned the blank and filthy windows of the ancient stone building, wondering which of them might have been Lavinia Willoughby’s, which of those barred portals might have stood between her and the world outside the Asylum’s walls.

How had she stood it? How had any of them stood it? Even if they weren’t insane when they entered that building, surely they would have been after only a few months’ stay.

His headache spreading into his left temple now, Oliver switched on the lamp that was on the table between the bed and the chair in which he sat, and went back to Lavinia Willoughby’s file.

It was after her acknowledgment of her relationship with her father—and her admission that she had initiated it—that electroconvulsive therapy had been prescribed for Lavinia.

As Oliver began reading the description of the treatment that had been administered to her, a blinding stab of pain slashed through his head and a shroud of utter blackness closed around him.

The boy is looking straight up, watching the pattern of light and shadow on the ceiling change. He knows it is useless to struggle against the thick leather straps that hold him to the gurney: even if he could work his arms and legs free, there is no place to run to, for he knows there is no way to escape the people who have tied him down, let alone escape the building itself
.

He tries not to think about where they might be taking him, but it doesn’t matter
.

All of the rooms are the same
.

All of them terrify him
.

The gurney stops, and the boy is able to shift his eyes just enough to see a door. A plaque is mounted on it, with three letters:

E. C. T
.

The boy doesn’t know what the letters mean, but he instantly knows that all the rooms are not the same and this is the worst of all of them
.

He can feel a scream building in his throat, but he struggles against it, knowing if he shows how terrified he is, it will only be worse. Besides, even if anyone heard him scream, they wouldn’t come to help him
.

They never do
.

One of the orderlies opens the door, and the other one pushes the gurney inside. The boy catches a glimpse of the box on a table against one of the walls, and feels the knot in his stomach turn into a ball of fire
.

And suddenly he has to go to the bathroom
.

He tries to tell the orderly, but now he is so terrified that his mouth has gone dry, and the only sound that comes out is a choking sob as he struggles not to cry
.

He shuts his eyes: maybe if he doesn’t watch, it won’t happen
.

When he hears the door open and close, and the familiar voice ask if everything is ready, he squeezes his eyes shut tighter, as if by closing out more of the light he might close out the sound of the voice as well
.

The darkness, though, is even more frightening than what he has seen, and when he finally risks a peek, he knows it is going to happen again
.

The wooden box is open, and the man is taking the bright metal plates out of it
.

Though the boy tries not to watch, he can’t help himself, and his eyes never leave the metal contacts as the man applies a gooey substance to them, then snaps them into a heavy band of rubber
.

One of the orderlies fastens the band around the boy’s head
.

As the boy braces himself, the orderlies bend over him, pressing his body down against the gurney. He squeezes his eyes shut again
.

The first shock jolts through him, and every muscle in his body convulses, jerking his limbs against the restraining straps with so much force he thinks his legs and arms must be broken
.

But even worse is the hot wetness spreading from his crotch and the stink coming from behind his buttocks
.

Crying as much from shame as from the pain, the boy waits for the next shock
.

And the next
.

And the next …

Melissa Holloway exited the front door of the bank just as Ed Becker’s Buick pulled up to the curb.

“See how prompt I am?” Bill McGuire got out of the passenger seat and held the door for Melissa. “Give me a schedule, and I adhere to it.”

Though his inflection was bantering, the nervous look in the contractor’s eyes belied his tone, and as Melissa waved him into the front seat while she herself got into the back of the big sedan, she tried to allay his obvious fears.

“This is only a formality, Bill,” she said. “I just think I ought to at least take one good look at the project, since
suddenly it’s going to be
my
name signing off on the final approval for the loan.”

“Yours, and the board’s,” Ed Becker reminded her.

“Mine and the board’s,” Melissa agreed. “But why don’t I think it’s the board that’s going to get fired if anything goes wrong?”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Bill McGuire assured her as Ed turned up Amherst Street. “Jules was all set to fund the loan when—”

“Jules isn’t here anymore,” Melissa cut in, deciding it was time for her to assert herself a little more strongly. “And let’s not forget that we’re not quite out of the woods on the audit yet. If the loan has to hinge solely on Jules’s last recommendation, I’m afraid it’s not going to fly.” She saw the two men in the front seat glance uneasily at each other, but neither of them said anything. “Let’s also not forget that it was the way Jules ran the bank that got us into trouble in the first place.”

“But the Center Project is perfectly sound—” Bill McGuire began. This time it was Ed Becker who cut him off.

“Melissa knows the math better than either one of us,” the lawyer told him. “She knows it works on paper. But a good banker wants to know it’s going to work in the real world too.”

“I know.” Bill sighed. “It’s just that ever since this whole thing began … well, you both know what I’m saying.”

Though neither Ed Becker nor Melissa Holloway replied, they did, indeed, know exactly what Bill was saying. For the last four months, ever since Bill’s wife had miscarried their second child, only to kill herself a few days later, a sense of foreboding had fallen over the town. When the news had spread that there were problems at the bank, and then Jules Hartwick disemboweled himself on the steps of the Asylum, the foreboding had turned to apprehension. No one, though, had expected
Martha Ward to be next. Her fiery death ignited a conflagration of fear and suspicion in Blackstone. The very atmosphere throbbed with anxiety. Neighbors who for years had greeted each other with cheerful hellos had now begun to cast wary eyes on their fellow townsmen, as if trying to ferret out who might next fall victim to whatever curse had been visited upon the town.

And each of them prayed that he might be spared.

Their arrival at the Asylum did nothing to dispel the mood that had descended over all three of them. As Melissa Holloway got out of the Buick’s backseat and gazed up at the building’s grimy stone facade, an unbidden vision of the hospital in which she herself had once been confined came into her mind, and she wondered if she really wanted to venture through the great oaken doors. But as Bill McGuire turned the key in the lock and the heavy door creaked open, Melissa firmly put her memories aside, reminding herself that what had happened in Secret Cove when she was a child had nothing to do with Blackstone today. Taking a deep breath—a breath that almost succeeded in calming her nerves—she followed Ed Becker and Bill McGuire as they led the way into the Asylum.

Little was left of the splendor that had graced the building in the days before it had been converted from a private mansion into a hospital for the insane. What had once been a series of large, elegant rooms had at some point been subdivided into a warren of tiny offices. Bill McGuire led them from room to room explaining the building’s original floor plan and describing what it would look like when the reconstruction was completed. “This will become an atrium,” he said as they returned to the entry hall. As they threaded their way through the maze of empty rooms on the west side of the building, the fading sunlight that filtered through the dirt-encrusted windows did little to dispel the ominousness of the place. Finally, toward the rear of the building, they came to
the foot of what once must have been an impressive staircase.

“The stairs are original,” Bill pointed out, “but somewhere along the line the mahogany banisters and balustrades were replaced with metal ones. Probably at the same time the sprinkler system was put in.” He gazed sourly up at the network of pipes suspended from a Celotex ceiling of the kind that had been popular back in the late forties and early fifties. “The last remodeling was done only a couple of years before they closed the place.”

“Why
did
they close it?” Melissa asked.

Bill McGuire and Ed Becker exchanged glances. In the silence that followed, each of them seemed to be waiting for the other to speak. It was Ed who finally said, “No one really knows exactly what happened.” He paused. “Oliver Metcalf’s father was the superintendent, and when Oliver and his twin sister were almost four, his sister died. There were all kinds of rumors at the time. Most people thought it was an accident, but some people blamed Oliver. There were even a few who blamed Dr. Metcalf. It was before my time, of course, but local lore has it that things went downhill from there. Metcalf never really recovered from the tragedy. Over time, many of the patients were moved to other places, and there weren’t any new ones. In the end, when Metcalf died, the trustees decided to shut it down instead of trying to find a new director.”