The Blackstone Chronicles (50 page)

All day, Oliver had listened to his uncle’s words replay in his mind, and slowly he began to understand what had happened to him. The gaps in his memory suddenly made sense—even now, so many years later, the mental image he conjured up of two small children playing with a dangerous instrument made him shudder, and when he tried to imagine the knife plunging into his sister’s neck, the horror of the image was so great, he was unable to complete it even in his imagination.

What must it have been like when he’d been only four years old?

No wonder he’d blotted it out, hiding it from himself as thoroughly as he’d managed to hide the weapon from his father, and everyone else who’d searched for it.

No wonder people had looked at him so strangely all his life. Although his uncle insisted that Malcolm Metcalf never told anyone else what had happened, and Mallory’s death had been officially deemed accidental, there would have been as many rumors about his sister as there now were about what had really taken place in the Wagners’ house.

As had happened so often over the days since she’d disappeared, an image of Rebecca rose in Oliver’s mind. Since her mysterious disappearance, he’d felt an emptiness inside him, a hole at his very core that grew larger with each passing day. His frustration had grown too, as he’d realized there was nothing—nothing at all—he could do to help her.

But of one thing he’d become absolutely certain: when
Rebecca was found—and he wouldn’t let himself even think of the possibility that she might not be found—he would ask her to marry him.

But now, as his uncle’s words echoed in his mind, he knew that when Rebecca returned, he couldn’t ask her to marry him. Not until he’d banished the demons—the demons that brought the blinding headaches and the terrifying blank spots in his memory. This morning he had at last found the source of those demons.

And the reason he had not been able to make himself go to bed tonight was clear: he knew that the time had finally come to face the demons, and vanquish them.

Sometime during the day it had come to him, a slow and dawning realization of the reason he could not bring himself to enter the Asylum: the certainty that the “accident,” the terrible thing that had happened to Mallory, must have taken place within those dark stone walls. From the moment he realized this, he knew that until he walked through those great oaken doors, he would not sleep. Yet as the afternoon had passed and daylight gave way to darkness, the courage of the sun had yielded to the shadowy terrors the moon brings with it. Now, as the clock downstairs struck midnight, Oliver knew he could put it off no longer.

He must enter the Asylum tonight or forever abandon hope of destroying the demons that haunted him.

Forever give up the hope of Rebecca.

Pulling on a jacket, he took his flashlight from its charger, checked to be sure the beam was at its brightest, then removed the key to the Asylum’s door from the hook next to his own. Even then he hesitated, but finally pulled his front door open and gazed up at the shadowed building looming atop the hill, fifty yards away.

Dark, silent, it stood against the night sky like some great brooding monster, quiescent now, but ready to come to furious life the instant it sensed an unwelcome presence. Oliver started up the path, moving carefully,
stepping lightly, as if the mere sound of his feet crunching on the gravel might be enough to bring forth whatever evil lurked within the blackened stone walls.

At the foot of the steps leading to the heavy double doors, he hesitated again. Already a headache was stalking the fringes of his consciousness. As he mounted the steps and inserted the key into the lock, the first waves of pain washed over him. Steeling himself, Oliver drove the pain back into the dark hole from which it had crept, pushed the heavy oak panel open, and stepped inside.

Turning on the flashlight, he played its beam over the shadowed interior.

Where? Where should he go?

But even as the questions formed in his mind, some long-buried memory seeping out from his subconscious guided him through the warren of offices until he stopped in front of a door.

It seemed no different from any of the others, yet behind this door, he knew, were the rooms that had been his father’s office. His hand trembling, Oliver reached out, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

Still outside the threshold, he let the flashlight’s beam inch through the room, searching every corner it could reach for whatever dark menaces might be lurking in wait.

But the room was empty.

His heart pounding and his right temple dully throbbing, Oliver forced himself to step through the doorway, expectant, unconsciously holding his breath.

There was nothing.

No sound. No sense of an unseen presence.

Only three bare walls, long stripped of the pictures that had once adorned them, and a fourth wall, lined with empty bookshelves.

He had no real memory of this space at all, yet still felt
as though the room should be bigger than it was. But of course the last time he would have been in this room he had still been a little boy and it would have seemed huge.

Now it seemed small, and cramped, and dingy.

Crossing to a door that led to an adjoining room, Oliver paused, searching his memory for a clue as to what might lie beyond, but there was none. At last he grasped the knob and turned it, pulling the door open.

The flashlight revealed a bathroom.

A large tiled bathroom, still equipped with an old-fashioned, claw-footed bathtub, a toilet with a flushing tank pinned high on the wall—its pull chain long since disappeared—and a pedestal sink standing below an old-fashioned medicine cabinet with a mirrored door.

Oliver played the light into every corner of the room, but once again found nothing even slightly threatening. It was just as barren and grubby as the office next door. But then, as he was turning back toward the door, the beam of the flashlight struck the mirror above the sink. Through the layer of grime that had built up over the years, Oliver caught a quick glimpse of the bathtub.

Now, in the reflected glow of the beam, it was no longer empty.

Two figures, their eyes glimmering in the light, peered back at him.

Stunned, Oliver whirled around to bathe the figures in the flashlight’s brilliant beam, but even as he turned, an explosion of pain erupted in his head. He staggered, reached for the sink as he fell to his knees, then slumped to the floor. The flashlight, released from his grip, clattered on the tiles and blinked out, and the room dropped into a blackness as dark as the unconsciousness into which the agonizing pain had driven Oliver Metcalf.

The Asylum was once again as still as death.

E
d Becker gazed dolefully at the glowing digits on the clock next to his bed. The last time he looked they had read
1:14 A.M
. Now, unbelievably, they read
1:23 A.M
. How could only nine minutes have passed in what had seemed to Ed like at least an hour? Yet the colon was flashing steadily, once a second, just as it always did.

Bonnie was sleeping peacefully beside him, not even making a movement or emitting a sound he could blame for his own sleeplessness, so he didn’t have a decent excuse to wake her up. Finally giving up altogether on the idea of sleeping, he slid out of bed, pulled on his robe, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he fished around in the refrigerator until he found a package of sliced ham, some turkey, and a loaf of bread. Five minutes later he carried his sandwich, along with a glass of milk, into the living room. Switching on the television set, he turned the volume down low enough so as not to disturb his wife and daughter, then restlessly switched it off again and picked up the latest issue of the
Blackstone Chronicle
, a special edition Oliver had hastily put out, most of it taken up with news of the death of Germaine Wagner and the disappearance of Rebecca Morrison. Though he’d elected to keep his own counsel, Ed privately agreed with those who suspected that Rebecca might have had more to do with Germaine’s death than Steve Driver was currently thinking. It had been Ed’s experience—and he would be the first to admit that his
own experiences didn’t make him the most objective of observers—that often it was exactly the kind of sweet, quiet woman, such as Rebecca appeared to be, who secretly harbored an anger that could explode into violence like the carnage that had swept through the Wagner house.

Oliver Metcalf, though, had carefully slanted the story to be so sympathetic toward Rebecca that she sounded like a saint.

Ed Becker didn’t believe in saints.

On the other hand, it was exactly the kind of thinking he was indulging in right now—the assumption that not only did evil lurk within even the most innocent-appearing souls, but it would inevitably manifest itself in murder—that had finally led him to give up his practice and leave the darker side of Boston behind. So maybe Rebecca was every bit as innocent as Oliver presented her.

Putting the paper aside, he swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and, rising, carried the plate and glass back to the kitchen. He was about to switch off the light when he suddenly caught a whiff of something.

Gas!

Moving to the stove, he checked to make sure all the valves were tightly closed.

Every one of them was shut. The pilot light burned steadily blue.

Frowning, Ed glanced around the kitchen, then moved toward the door to the basement stairs. Instinctively reaching for the light switch as he opened the door, he reeled back as fumes surged out of the basement, nearly choking him. He slammed the door closed again, then broke out in a cold sweat as he realized what could have happened if he’d actually turned the light on. Any spark from the switch might cause the gas to explode. Then, as he remembered there was a freezer in the basement—a
freezer that switched on and off automatically several times every day and night—his heart began to pound.

Out!

He had to get Bonnie and Amy out, right now!

Racing out of the kitchen, he bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Bonnie!” Shouting his wife’s name again, he slammed open the door to their bedroom. “Get out!” he yelled. “Quick!”

Jerking awake, Bonnie sat up in bed. “Ed? What—”

“Don’t talk! Don’t ask questions. Just get out of the house! I’ll get Amy!” As Bonnie finally started to get out of bed, Ed ran down the hall to his daughter’s room, throwing its door open with enough violence that he heard the plaster behind it crack and fall to the floor as the knob struck it. Amy, already sitting up, was rubbing her eyes as Ed reached down and scooped her out of bed, snagging the blanket that had been covering her as well. “Come on, honey,” he said. “I have to get you out of here.”

Amy, still half asleep, tried to wriggle free. “No!” she wailed. “It’s still night! I don’t want to get up!”

Ignoring his daughter’s words but tightening his grip on her, Ed dashed out of the room, coming to the head of the stairs just as Bonnie, now clad in a robe and slippers, was emerging from the master bedroom.

“What is it?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Gas!” Ed shouted as he started down the stairs. “The whole basement’s full of it!”

A moment later he was fumbling with the chain on the front door, but Bonnie darted in front of him, her nimble fingers instantly freeing it from its catch. Then they were out of the house and hurrying across the front lawn. Only when they were on the sidewalk did Ed finally stop and lower Amy to the ground.

“Gas?” Bonnie repeated. “What are you talking about? How did you—”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Ed told her. “So I went down and
made myself a sandwich, and while I was cleaning up, I smelled it. I thought it was the stove, but—”

The blast cut off his words in midsentence, and he instinctively reached down and pulled Amy back into his arms as shards of glass exploded from the small light wells that served as the basement’s two windows, and the long-unused access door to the coal bin blew off its hinges, allowing an enormous ball of fire to boil out of the cellar and roll across the driveway.

Shrieking, Amy wrapped her arms around her father, and buried her face in his shoulder.

“It’s all right,” Ed whispered into his daughter’s ear. “It’s going to be all right.”

But in his head he was hearing the sound of the explosion over and over again.

It sounded exactly like the blast of the gun that Paul Becker had fired at him in his dream.

Rebecca wasn’t sure what had awakened her; indeed, it was only the slow process of coming back to consciousness that told her she’d been asleep at all.

She wasn’t afraid anymore—at least not in any way she’d been familiar with before being brought to the place that had become her dark, cold world. The things that had once frightened her—the unidentifiable sounds of the night, which only a few days ago would send goose bumps racing up her spine, or the imagined presences that might be lurking in the shadows on the evenings she walked home alone from the library—now seemed like old friends whose reappearance would bring her comfort in the total isolation into which she’d fallen.