The Blackstone Chronicles (54 page)

For a while she tried to keep track of the passing time, tried to count the seconds that had turned into small eternities, but even that had become impossible, for there was no way to remember how many seconds she’d counted, no way to mark the passing minutes and hours.

The Tormentor—that was how she thought of her captor now, as almost an abstraction of a being, rather than a man with a face hidden by darkness and a personality concealed by silence. The Tormentor came and went, and Rebecca had long since ceased to feel any reaction to him.

Not surprise.

Not terror.

Not even apprehension anymore.

At first, in a time grown dim and distant in her memory, she had feared his coming, her heart pounding when she heard his scraping step or even sensed his presence when no sound betrayed that he was there.

He brought her food and water, though, for which she was grateful, though his whispered words made her flesh crawl no less than did his touch. But as the cold had tunneled deeper within her mind and her body and her spirit, Rebecca even stopped thinking about what it might be that he wanted from her, what reason he might have had for bringing her here.

Now, as her mind rose slowly out of the black pit of sleep, and the cold-induced nightmares loosened their
grip, she sensed that he was there once more. It was nothing in the darkness that betrayed his presence; no sound of footsteps or rasping breath, no whispered words murmured in her ear, no touch of gloved fingers on her flesh.

Only a sense that she was not alone.

Then there was a minute lessening of the darkness, and like a flower turning toward the sun, she found herself turning her head, an involuntary groping for the source of the faint brightening that slightly grayed her world of darkness.

Then there was a new sensation.

Arms were picking her up. As she was lifted off the floor on which she lay, every nerve and muscle in her body screamed in protest, and a cry of anguished agony rose in her throat.

For an instant she tried to open her mouth to give vent to the erupting scream, but a tearing pain in her lips reminded her of the tape that covered her mouth. With a surge of sudden determination she managed to control her scream before it could back up in her throat, choke and strangle her and make her retch, and fill her mouth and nose with burning bile. As the wave of pain crashed over her and finally began to ebb, her cry of agonized protest emerged as nothing more than a stifled and sighing moan.

Held tightly in the Tormentor’s grasp, she felt herself being carried out of the room that had been her prison, and though she could see nothing through the tape blindfold, she had a sense of walls that were close at hand on either side, and knew with an instinctive certainty that she was being borne down a long corridor. The Tormentor’s
pace changed, and Rebecca had a vague sensation of rising.

Stairs! She was being carried up a flight of stairs.

Another corridor, but, oddly, she sensed that this one was wider than the other, that the spaces here were larger. But how could she know? The darkness around her was only a nearly imperceptible shade lighter than the blackness into which she’d been sunk for so long.

And yet something was different.

Something had changed.

Something was about to happen.

Something terrible.

I
t was a glorious spring morning. Under normal circumstances, Oliver Metcalf would have been humming to himself as he fixed his first cup of coffee, glanced through the
Manchester Guardian
, then set off for the office, savoring every breath of the sweet air. A day when he might have paused to watch the baby robins tumbling across the lawn in front of Bill McGuire’s house as their parents hopped anxiously around, cheeping their encouragement while the chicks struggled through their first clumsy flight lessons. A day when he would have dawdled at the Red Hen over an extra cup of coffee before heading to the
Chronicle
office; a sunshiny, optimistic morning that might have induced him to wonder if this would be the day that Rebecca Morrison agreed to let him take her out to dinner.

On a day like today he might even have planned a run down to Boston. But this morning, as on every morning since Rebecca disappeared, Oliver was barely aware of the fresh April breeze or the new buds on the venerable elms outside his kitchen window. From the moment he’d awakened from a restless sleep that had been disturbed by nightmares he couldn’t quite remember—vaguely horrible dreams he wasn’t sure he
wanted
to
remember—dire thoughts of what might have happened to Rebecca were already churning through his mind. He was still trying to hold to the hope that Germaine Wagner’s terrible accident had upset Rebecca so much that she’d simply fled from it. But as the days dragged by, and his heart had filled with expectation every time the phone rang, only to deflate with disappointment when it was not Rebecca’s voice each time he picked it up, it was becoming harder and harder to cling to the faith that Rebecca would return to Blackstone—and to him—unharmed.

Surely, if she was all right, she would have called him. Unless what she’d witnessed in the Wagners’ house had been so horrifying that she simply blocked it, and everything else, out of her memory. Except that Oliver knew just how rare amnesia really was—far more common, in fact, in romance novels and cheap thrillers than it was in real life. Unable to fly directly in the face of logic, he had finally admitted to himself that she must be in danger, perhaps deadly danger. That thought led directly to a depression into which he was sinking deeper every day. Although with every dawn that had broken since her disappearance, Oliver told himself that today he would at last hear from her, the self-assurances had long since begun to ring hollow.

Still, he was resolutely unwilling to grant any credibility to the people who thought Rebecca had finally turned on Germaine. Like everyone in town, Oliver was aware of how badly Germaine Wagner had treated Rebecca. But deep in his heart he was certain that Rebecca was incapable of violence. No, it would have been much more like Rebecca to pity Germaine for the
woman’s unhappiness than to turn on her for her meanness of spirit.

All that was left, then, was that something terrible had befallen Rebecca. That thought—and his inability to do anything to help her—now weighed so heavily on Oliver that he was finding it more and more difficult even to get out of bed in the morning. The combined effects of his sleepless tossing and turning, and the nightmares that plagued him when he did sleep, were taking their toll. This morning, he had almost decided to call Lois and tell her he wouldn’t be in. Yet the prospect of staying alone in his house all day was even less appealing, so finally, shoulders stooped with the weight of his worry, he set out down Amherst Street toward the village.

The walk did little to pick up his spirits. Crossing Oak, he came to the part of Amherst Street where both the McGuires and the Beckers lived, and saw Megan McGuire sitting on the swing that hung from the lowest branch of an enormous oak tree in her front yard. He stopped for a moment intending to talk to her, and called out, “Good morning.” At first she didn’t seem to hear him. When he called her name, she looked sharply up at him, then got off the swing and started toward him, cradling a doll in her arms.

The doll that had been an anonymous gift, either for her or for the baby her mother had been about to deliver when Elizabeth McGuire had miscarried.

“It hurts every time I look at it,” Bill McGuire had told Oliver a few weeks before. “But I can’t bring myself to take the damn thing away from her. Since Elizabeth died, she keeps it with her all the time. Even takes it to school with her. I talked to Phil Margolis about it, but he says I should just let her be, at least for a while.” The pain had
misted Bill’s eyes, and his voice had cracked. “Of course, that’s what he said about Elizabeth too,” he went on. “But I shouldn’t have let her be. I should have stayed with her, every minute.”

Oliver had tried to reassure him. “You can’t blame yourself, Bill. All of us are responsible for our own lives, but not for other people’s. And Elizabeth was …” He hadn’t finished his sentence, but he hadn’t needed to.

“Delicate?” Bill had asked, his tone tinged with bitterness. “Isn’t that what Edna Burnham always says? That Elizabeth was ‘delicate’?” He’d shaken his head. “She got through her sister’s breakdown when she was a child, and she got through the loss of her parents a few years later. If you’re ’delicate,’ you don’t survive tragedies like that. But losing the baby was just too much for her, and I should have known that. I should have known not to leave her alone that morning.”

Unlike her father, whose grief had not abated, Megan seemed to Oliver to have sublimated her sorrow by focusing entirely on the doll, which she was clutching protectively even now, as she crossed the lawn toward him. He supposed Phil Margolis was right, and that given enough time, Megan would emerge from the shell she seemed to have formed around herself and the doll. As Megan walked slowly toward the sidewalk where he stood, Oliver could see her lips moving as she whispered to the doll.

“How are you today, Megan?” Oliver asked as the little girl stopped a few feet away from him.

“I’m all right,” Megan replied. “Sam and I were playing on the swing.”

“ ‘Sam,’ ” Oliver repeated. “Why did you name him Sam?”

Megan’s eyes instantly darkened. “Sam’s a girl,” she said. “We don’t like boys.”

“I see,” Oliver said gravely. “May I hold Sam?”

Megan shook her head. “Nobody can hold Sam but me,” she said. “She’s my friend, and I’m her friend, and she hates everyone else.” She looked lovingly down into the doll’s face. “Isn’t that right, Sam?” A moment later, as if the doll had spoken to her, Megan looked up at Oliver again. “Sam wants you to go away now,” she announced. “She wants you to leave us alone.”

Oliver hesitated, but suddenly there was a look in Megan’s eyes such as he’d never seen in a child before.

Evil
.

The word rose up in his mind and took Oliver by surprise, like a right hook to the jaw. Astonished, he recovered himself to see that the demon-flash was gone. But Megan stared steadily at him, and under the child’s relentless gaze it was finally he who shifted his eyes from hers.

“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say, almost as if the words were coming from someone else. “I didn’t mean to—” He stopped, aware that he’d been about to apologize for having
bothered
Megan. How ridiculous that he, an adult, should feel the need to apologize to this little girl merely for having spoken a few friendly words!

Worse, why did the way she was staring at him upset him so?

Saying nothing more to her, Oliver turned and continued down Amherst Street.

A moment later he was across from the Becker house. It was empty now. Bonnie and Amy had moved down to Boston, where Ed was still in intensive care. Three vertebrae in his neck had been shattered in his fall the night of
the explosion in the basement, and though Ed was still alive, he was dependent on a respirator to breathe for him, and had yet to speak a word since the accident. The doctors assured Bonnie that in time he would be able to talk again, but when Oliver had gone down to Boston the day before yesterday to see Ed, he’d wondered if the doctors had told Bonnie the truth. Though Ed had been awake—Oliver had seen his eyes blink several times during the half hour he sat with Ed—he hadn’t been certain whether Ed even knew he was there, much less recognized him. There was a look in the attorney’s eyes—a gaze that, though not vacant, had not been focused on him either. Ed Becker appeared to have wandered into some other world, a universe buried so deep within his own mind that he was unable to find his way back to the plane of ordinary life in which he had existed before his accident.

When Oliver left the ICU, Bonnie told him about the dreams Ed had been having—dreams Ed had claimed were coming true—and about the stereoscope they’d found in the chest of drawers that Ed brought down from the Asylum.

“I keep thinking about those gifts everyone’s been talking about,” Bonnie said, her eyes looking almost as haunted as her husband’s. “Except the stereoscope wasn’t a gift at all—it just happened to be in one of the drawers in that old dresser.”

Bonnie had told him about the pictures too, and when he returned to Blackstone, Oliver, curious, had gone to their house, entering with the keys she’d provided, to look for the stereoscope and view the pictures.

He’d found no trace either of the stereoscope or of the photographs Bonnie—and Amy too—had described to
him. They had vanished as thoroughly as if they’d never existed, though Bonnie had directed him to the coffee table in the living room, where, she said, they’d been on the night that Ed had fallen. Oliver had searched everywhere, but they were nowhere to be found. The house itself had taken on an odd feeling of abandonment, as if it knew that Bonnie had decided she would never set foot in it again. “It isn’t just what happened to Ed,” she’d insisted. “I just don’t think I’d ever feel safe there again. Not after the explosion. I’d never get a wink of sleep in that house. And I could never let Amy sleep there again.”