The Blackstone Chronicles (59 page)

Oliver’s fear congealed into a terror that crawled up
from his subconscious like a demon from Hell, reaching out to grasp him in its sharp-clawed fingers. His father’s voice.

“Tell me what you did, Oliver.”

Oliver tried to shrink away into the darkness—shrink from the voice, cower away from the demon inside that was quickly taking possession of him, draining his strength, twisting his reason, threatening to destroy his mind. But there was no escape, no place to hide, neither from his father’s voice nor from the terror within.

“Tell me, Oliver,” his father’s voice commanded again. “Tell me what you are. Tell me what you did.”

“I’m a bad boy,” the little boy’s voice said again, and now Oliver recognized it clearly.

His voice
.

He was hearing his own voice
.

“I’m a very bad boy.”

“That’s right,” his father’s voice replied. “You’re a very, very bad boy.”

The darkness around the gleaming razor began to fade to the silvery gray of dawn, and slowly the razor and its glistening coat of blood began to fall from focus. But the light kept brightening, until finally Oliver had to squeeze his eyes closed against it. Then he heard his father’s voice once more, and knew he was powerless to disobey.

“Open your eyes, Oliver,” Malcolm Metcalf’s voice commanded. “Open them.”

Oliver is standing just inside the front door to the Asylum. His father’s hand is squeezing his own so tightly it hurts, but Oliver knows there is no way he can pull his hand free and run from his father into the sunshine outside
.

He flinches as the huge oak door swings closed behind him with a thud that seems to echo through the great open room forever
.

No one else, though, seems to hear it
.

His father is moving now, taking such great long strides that Oliver, even though his stubby legs are moving as fast as he can make them, can barely keep up with him
.

There are people all around him
.

Some of them he recognizes. Women in white clothes. Nurses. Men in white coats. Doctors. There are others too, whose clothes look to Oliver just like the ones the doctors wear, but he knows they aren’t doctors
.

Until a little while ago, he hadn’t known what the other ones—the ones who weren’t doctors—did
.

But now he knows, and when one of them says hello to him, Oliver doesn’t say hello back
.

There are other people too, people dressed in pajamas and bathrobes even though it isn’t even close to bedtime, even for Oliver
.

Finally, they come to the top of a long flight of stairs, steep stairs that descend into darkness. Oliver’s heart begins to thump and it’s hard for him to breathe. Down. They go down the stairs into the blackness below until they come to the bottom and his father leads him down a long hall. There are closed doors on both sides of the hall, and Oliver tries not to look at any of them, fearful of what might lie beyond
.

At last, his father opens one of the doors
.

“No, Daddy,” Oliver whimpers. “Please, Daddy, don’t make me—”

But it is too late. His father drags him through the door, then closes it behind them
.

There is a sharp click as the lock slides home
.

His father lets go of his hand, and Oliver, so terrified that his legs have lost their strength, falls to the floor, then scuttles back against the wall. Whimpering with fear, he watches as his father goes to a cabinet, opens its door, and takes out a long metal tube, from one end of which two shiny metal nubs stick out
.

“No, Daddy,” Oliver whispers. “No …”

As Oliver cowers against the wall, his father presses the end of the metal tube against the bare skin of Oliver’s leg
.

“Don’t talk back to me, Oliver,” Malcolm Metcalf says, his voice harsh. “Don’t ever talk back to me!”

A jolt of electricity shoots through Oliver’s leg. He shrieks as the muscles of his leg jerk spasmodically, and his foot strikes his father’s shin
.

“Don’t kick,” Malcolm Metcalf commands. “Don’t you dare kick me!”

Again the metal tube touches Oliver, this time on the other leg, and instantly a second shock buzzes through him. His foot smashes painfully against the tiled wall, and another squeal erupts from his throat
.

His father towers over him. “Be quiet! Take it like a man!”

As the terrible metal tube hovers near him, Oliver tries to scuttle away. He is crying now, partly from fear, partly from the burning sting of the prod, as his father comes after him with the metal stick
.

Shock after shock jolts through him; his muscles contract spasmodically with each one until he is
wailing, a high, keening cry, punctuated with screams of pain every time a shock courses through him
.

“Be quiet, Oliver!” his father demands. “You must learn to do as I tell you!”

Oliver tries once more to wriggle away from his father’s wrath, but there is no escaping the towering figure
.

Zap!

Another shock. Another spasm
.

On all fours, Oliver tries to crawl between his father’s legs
.

Zap!

His arms and legs splay in every direction, and he drops onto his stomach
.

Zap!

He rolls over, curling into a tight ball
.

Zap!

He feels a hot wetness spread from his crotch, and begins to sob
.

Zap!
“Stop crying, Oliver!”

Zap!
“I told you to stop crying!”

Zap! Zap! Zap!

Oliver’s bowels suddenly turn to liquid, and a terrible odor fills his nostrils as one more jab of the prod costs him the last of his self-control
.

Sobbing, lying in his own filth, he wraps his arms around his legs and clamps his eyes shut. His whole body shakes as he waits for the next shock. It does not come. Instead there is his father’s voice
.

“What are you?” Malcolm Metcalf asks
.

“A bad boy,” Oliver whispers. “I’m a very bad boy.”

Without another word, his father unlocks the door
and leaves the room. When the door closes, Oliver has just the briefest moment of hope, but then he hears the click of the lock as his father turns it from the outside
.

Crying softly, the little boy remains on the floor for a few more minutes, waiting for the pain in his body to subside. Then, knowing what he must do before the door will be unlocked again, he begins cleaning up the mess on the floor, using his shirt as a towel, washing it out over and over again at the little sink that is bolted to one of the room’s walls
.

He is, he knows, a very bad boy indeed
.

So bad that neither his father, nor anyone else, will ever love him again
.

The darkness closed around him, and once again all Oliver could see in the blackness was the glimmering blade of the razor.

The razor, and the blood of his sister.

E
verything had changed.

It seemed to Oliver that he was hanging, suspended, in some netherworld that had no relationship to Blackstone, or to the life he had lived there.

It wasn’t dark—not exactly—and yet he couldn’t see.

He felt as if he were deaf, yet there was no sense of sound at all, no feeling of vibration in his head, or distant muffled noises that he thought he should have heard more clearly.

His sense of touch had deserted him too, and he couldn’t be certain whether he was moving or standing still.

He could have been sitting, or lying down, or even curled up, his arms wrapped around his knees the way he’d liked to sleep when he was a little boy.

A little boy …

The thought hung with him in the void.

That’s what he was: a boy. A little boy. He was no longer Oliver Metcalf, forty-five and a responsible adult, editor of the town newspaper. Somehow, he had been transported into some other world, the world of his childhood that, without knowing it, he had years ago closed off behind a curtain of blackness. But now the curtain
was parting. Before him, as he waited, the gray half-light brightened.

The first thing he knew was that he was afraid.

Afraid because he’d done something wrong.

Bad! He was a bad boy! A very bad boy!

He was a bad boy, and his father was going to punish him.

And he deserved to be punished.

Oliver waited quietly in the not-quite-dark, not-quite-light. Somehow he knew that was the right thing to do. Sometimes his father didn’t come for a long time, and sometimes he came right away.

But Oliver knew he must be quiet, and he must wait. Because if he was bad, more bad things would happen.

Scraps of images began to float around him, and suddenly, the light was momentarily brighter again and he was able to catch glimpses of things.

A little girl.

She had a pretty face, framed by long blond hair, and she was holding something in her hands. A doll. A doll with a pretty porcelain face and golden hair.

Suddenly, from out of the twilight silence surrounding him, Oliver heard his father’s voice. But now his father wasn’t speaking to him. He was speaking to the little girl. “You can’t have it anymore,” his father decreed. “Little boys don’t play with dolls. They play with balls and bats!”

Now Oliver could hear the little girl, her sobs enveloping him the way his father’s voice had a moment ago. He saw her face, saw it change, saw the blond locks fall away, heard the cries reach a crescendo then fade away, and the strange silence fell over Oliver once again, and the child’s face took on the same odd grayness that was all around.

The grayness of death.

The little boy was dead.

Dead, like Oliver’s sister.

And in the twilight Oliver’s father was whispering. “Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand why he died?”

Oliver nodded, though he didn’t understand at all.

“We’re going to put the doll away,” his father’s voice whispered. “We’re going to put it away in the secret place. But you’re going to remember, Oliver. You’re going to remember all of it.”

His father’s voice faded again, leaving Oliver enshrouded in the grayness where, as before, he felt as if he was hanging in a void, suspended in a world without sensations.

A world in which there was no difference between night and day, no difference between sound and silence.

No difference between life and death.

Then a point of light appeared.

“Watch the light, Oliver,” his father’s voice instructed, penetrating the silence from an echoing distance that was nowhere yet everywhere.

Like the twilight itself, his father’s voice was simply present.

“Watch the light, Oliver,” his father’s voice said again. “Watch the light and see what it does.”

The light reappeared, a flame now, flickering in front of Oliver’s eyes.

Then the flame began to move, and now Oliver could see something else.

An arm.

An arm covered with soft skin, soft and smooth and pale. A woman’s skin.

The flame moved closer and closer to the skin.

Oliver wanted to cry out, to move the flame away from the woman’s skin, but the twilight held him in its thrall as tightly as if it were made with ropes and straps.

The flame licked at the skin on the arm, and then, from out of the silence, came a sound.

The roar of a dragon.

The roar sounded again, and then Oliver saw the dragon looming out of the twilight, its eyes glowing like twin rubies, its golden scales glittering even in the strange gray light. Its mouth opened, and once again it roared, a great bellow that hung in the air as a blast of fire burst from its throat.

As suddenly as it had appeared, the dragon vanished into the twilight, and all that was left was the vision of the woman’s arm, the skin charred black, great chunks of it peeling off, dropping away to reveal the raw flesh beneath.

Then, from somewhere in the gray eternity around him, Oliver heard the dragon roar once more, and the flesh before his eyes burst into flame.

Now he heard his father’s voice. “Do you understand, Oliver?”

“I understand,” Oliver silently breathed.

“You will remember?” his father’s voice demanded, and though the words were formed into a question, Oliver understood what would happen if he forgot.

“I will remember,” he promised.

“We will put the dragon with the doll,” his father’s voice whispered. “And when next you see it, you will know to whom it should belong.”

Once again time and space melded together.

Oliver hung in the gray silence.

More images flickered in front of him.

A scrap of cloth, intricately embroidered, a single letter, mirrored, worked perfectly into one of its corners.

A face appeared, and snakes writhed about him, and once again he heard his father’s voice.

“Remember what I’m showing you, Oliver. Remember what I’m saying. If you forget, you know what will happen.”