The Blackstone Chronicles (40 page)

G
ermaine Wagner huddled in her bed, her blanket wrapped around her, struggling against the panic that had overwhelmed her in the front parlor. She had neither turned on the light when she came into the room nor changed into her nightgown before retreating to the bed, so terrified was she of what she might see in the bright light of the chandelier, or hidden in the shadows of her closet. For a time—a long time—she sat trembling in the darkness, her heart pounding so hard she could hear nothing else, the vein in her forehead pulsing so strongly she feared she might have a stroke.

But as the endless minutes ticked by, the adrenaline in her blood began to be reabsorbed and her pulse to calm. As she emerged from the shock of her terror, her wits slowly came back to her and she began consciously to try to relax, to ease the tension that had led her to draw her legs up against her chest and to wrap her arms tightly around her knees.

This is not me
, she told herself.
I don’t react like this. Not to anything
.

But a second later, as her memory released a vision of the flies and gnats that had swarmed around her, and the snakes that writhed on the floor of the parlor, another wave of panic towered over her. This time, though, Germaine retained her self-control.

It didn’t happen, she silently insisted. Whatever it was, I only imagined it.

Germaine Wagner knew she was not the type to imagine things. She had always prided herself on her ability to see things clearly, and exactly as they were. Even when she’d been a child and her playmates had gazed up into the sky to envision elephants and tigers and other wondrous creatures soaring overhead, Germaine had seen nothing but stratus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus clouds drifting on the wind. The mind, she knew, was intended to be an analytical tool, and she believed in keeping it well honed, abstaining from ingesting any chemical that might interfere with its workings. She had never had a drink, never smoked a marijuana cigarette, and had certainly never experimented with any of the drugs that—

Drugs?

She turned the possibility over in her mind. Was it possible that Rebecca Morrison might have put something in the tea? Of course it was!

It was Rebecca’s revenge, a spiteful reaction for having taken the handkerchief from her before she could ruin it!

As her fear gave way to anger, Germaine touched the pocket of her blouse to be certain the handkerchief was still there. It would have been just like Rebecca to snatch it from her pocket while she was still under the influence of whatever substance the ungrateful girl had put into the tea. Finding that the handkerchief was still there, Germaine slipped it out of the pocket of her blouse and into her bra.

Her anger, though, was unassuaged. Obviously it had been a mistake to take Rebecca into her home. To repay her kindness—not to mention her mother’s!—with such a trick was unconscionable. Utterly unacceptable. Rebecca would simply have to find another place to live.

The decision made—and made unalterably, as were all her decisions—Germaine saw no point in putting off
telling Rebecca that she would have to find another place to stay.

Tonight would be the girl’s last under her roof.

Throwing back the blanket, Germaine started to rise, and then she heard a noise.

A faint scratching sound, as if something were trying to claw through the screen outside her window. Satisfied that she’d identified the sound, Germaine sat up and swung her feet off the bed.

The sound came again, only this time it wasn’t outside her window.

It was in the room.

A tiny clicking and scraping noise, as if something—something small—had scurried across the bare hardwood that was exposed around the edges of the antique rag rug that covered most of the floor.

A mouse?

Germaine’s feet jerked reflexively, then went firmly back down as she realized her terror had driven her into her bed without even taking off her shoes. As she stood, she heard the skittering sound again. This time, though, she ignored it, reaching for the electrified hurricane lamp that sat on her night table. She switched it on, and the warm glow of its light banished the darkness.

For just a moment Germaine relaxed. But then she heard the scampering again, and saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye. She jerked her head toward the movement so quickly that she felt a spasm of pain in her neck, and reached up to rub at the spot.

Something wriggled under her fingers!

She turned again, frantically trying to brush away the thing on her neck, and this time caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above her dresser.

A centipede, its dozens of tiny legs moving in smooth waves, was creeping up her neck. Gasping, Germaine brushed it off and tried to step on it, but it disappeared under the bed.

Dropping to her hands and knees, she lifted the bed’s skirt and peered beneath the metal frame, reaching for her slipper, intent on smashing the repulsive little creature.

But her slipper was gone. In its place was a large rat, its red eyes glaring at her, hissing as it crouched, ready to leap. Her heart racing, a tiny shriek escaped Germaine’s lips as she jerked her hand back. Then she saw another movement out of the corner of her eye, and lost her balance as she ducked away. As she sprawled out onto the rug, she felt something brush against her hair.

She rolled over, panic welling up uncontrollably, and tried to get to her feet. With a rush, something darted at her out of the corner of the room—a bat, she thought—and she ducked away again. Her foot catching on the rug, she plunged forward, her forehead smashing against the edge of her dresser.

A jagged spear of pain slashed through her head, and when she rubbed at the sore spot, she felt the warm stickiness of blood. A cry as much of fear as of pain erupted from her throat. Terrified, she tried to struggle to her feet.

Now the bat was back, fluttering around her head. She tried to swat it away but it swooped in close to her, then disappeared into the folds of the curtains that covered her window. Groping for something—anything—with which to protect herself from the bat, Germaine’s hand closed on an alabaster pot of face powder. She hurled it at the spot where she was certain she’d seen the bat. It smashed against the window, shattering into a hundred pieces, sending a cloud of powder boiling up from the broken pot, releasing a swarm of gnats and flies, countless times the number that had risen from the chocolate box downstairs. Millions of them, a dense, dark, choking cloud that swirled toward her. A moan of terror erupted from Germaine’s throat, and she backed away from the dark swarm, screaming, choking as they invaded her open
mouth. Coughing, beating them back with flailing arms, she dropped to her hands and knees.

Hundreds of mice ran out from under the bed; Germaine jerked her hands away as they stampeded over her fingers. Her knuckles smashed against the metal bed frame, tearing the skin away. As her stinging fingers began to bleed, the rat darted out into the open. Grabbing the bed lamp, Germaine smashed it down at the rodent. The glass shattered against the floor, shards flying up into her face, lacerating her skin.

The air was thick with insects, alive with bats, their wings beating, sharp teeth bared. With a scream that emerged as no more than a gagging sound, Germaine struggled to her feet and stumbled to her bathroom, slammed the door behind her, then groped for the light switch.

Brilliant white light flooded the room. Germaine stared into the mirror over the sink. But what she saw bore no resemblance to her own image. A gargoyle’s face stared back at her, blood oozing from its eyes, worms clinging to its cheeks. As it opened its toothless mouth, a serpent erupted from the dark hole, striking out at her with dripping fangs as the monster in the mirror reached out with clawed and scaled fingers.

With her own fists, Germaine smashed the mirror, sending broken glass cascading to the sink and floor. A glimmering scimitar slashed at her leg as it fell, then tumbled onward, glistening with blood, only to shatter on the tiles.

Every droplet of her blood seemed to come alive so that the floor was crawling with red ants. Germaine sank to her knees, sobbing, helplessly watching as the ants swarmed over her skin, feeling the fire of their millions upon millions of bites.

Crawling out of the bathroom, she lurched once more to her feet and staggered toward the door, finally escaping from her room onto the mezzanine. She peered
over the balustrade, gazing down into the vast entry hall below. Where the huge Oriental carpet had been spread all her life, now Germaine saw nothing but a terrifying pit filled with writhing snakes.

Sinking to her knees, she vomited onto the floor. The contents of her stomach spewed from her mouth, instantly turning into wriggling maggots and pulsing slugs, spreading around her, then turning to creep back toward her.

Out!

She had to get out!

But there was no way out, no escape save the staircase that led down to the pit of vipers.

There was no choice. Everywhere she looked, she saw some new threat advancing on her. She edged backward, her throat burning with acid, her stomach heaving. At the top of the stairs she peered down.

The steps cascaded away from her, dropping endlessly, the bottom unreachably far away.

She hesitated, and something dropped from the ceiling into her hair.

Twisting her neck to look up, she saw the spiders.

They were everywhere, their webs hanging from the chandelier and the skylight, covering the walls and the moldings. The spiders, black and shiny, the red hourglasses on their underbellies glimmering brightly, crept toward her.

She could hear their mandibles clicking, see the drops of poison that soon would be coursing through her veins.

Whimpering, nearly insane with fear, Germaine Wagner began scrabbling her way down the stairs toward the writhing mass of serpents that waited below.

T
hough the graveyard that adjoined the Congregational church was surrounded by no less than four of Blackstone’s old-fashioned streetlights, none of them cast enough illumination into the two-acre plot to penetrate the shadows in its center. Oliver paused as he came to the gate in the white picket fence, wondering if the headache that had been plaguing him all day would strike again.

Across the street someone was making his way through the square, but from where Oliver stood, the figure was no more than an indistinct dark silhouette that soon disappeared entirely. Suddenly feeling oddly exposed even in the dim glow cast by the converted gas lamps, Oliver stepped through the gate, closed it behind him, and made his way along the paths that twisted between the gravestones until he came to the weathered marble mausoleum that Charles Connally had built in 1927, when he and every one of his five sisters had made up their minds that they would not be buried in the edifice their father had already constructed for himself, his wife, and their six offspring.

An edifice in which old Jonas Connally—Harvey Connally’s grandfather and Oliver’s great-grandfather—had deliberately provided no space for the men his daughters had married, let alone Charles’s wife or any of their progeny.

To this day, the bodies of Jonas and Charity Connally lay in lonely splendor in an immense white limestone
building at the exact center of the cemetery, their mausoleum empty save for the two of them.

Their son and daughters—along with their own husbands, Charles’s wife Eleanor, and at least a few of every generation of their further descendants—were housed in six separate edifices, each of them built so that it faced away from the structure that Jonas Connally had erected, an eternal reminder that just as they had in life finally turned their backs on the patriarch of the Connally clan, so also had they turned away from him in death.

Oliver had always thought there was something almost inexpressibly sad in the manner in which the arrangement of the mausoleums bore eternal testament to the long-forgotten grudge that had existed between Jonas Connally, his son, Charles, and his five daughters, but of all the structures, he found the one built by Charles, Oliver’s own grandfather and the man who had erected the great mansion on North Hill, to be the saddest.

Though Charles Connally died long before Oliver had been born, his uncle Harvey had often told him of the elder Connally’s unflagging enthusiasm and optimism, which had extended even to the mausoleum he’d constructed with enough space for himself and his wife Eleanor, his children and their spouses, and a dozen grandchildren as well. But even after all these years, only four of the mausoleum’s crypts were occupied—and, Oliver thought grimly, only two more ever would be.

The pale marble structure glowed in the dim light, almost as if it were lit from within rather than by the four distant streetlights. As he approached it, Oliver gazed at the motto that had been etched deeply in the marble that formed the three steps leading to the crypts:

ALL ARE WELCOMED—NONE COMMANDED

Still another rebuke to his great-grandfather. As he did every time he read the words, Oliver wondered if he
would ever know what the quarrel between Jonas and his children had truly been about.