The Blackstone Chronicles (41 page)

That quarrel, though, had nothing to do with the reason he was here tonight. Mounting the steps, he stood facing the two crypts that were beneath and to the left of those occupied by his grandparents. Each of them bore a small plaque:

His mother and his sister, lying side by side.

He knew how his mother had died, of course. Giving birth to himself and Mallory proved to be too much for her, and in the end she lost her life so that both of her children might live.

A little girl, named for her husband.

A little boy, named for her.

The death of his sister, though, was as shrouded in mystery now as it had been on the day it occurred.

Pictures of both of them had been mounted into the stone, protected by thick glass, but long since faded to near invisibility. Yet Oliver knew every feature.

He reached out, laying his hand on his mother’s image, and, as always happened, felt his eyes moisten with tears. “Why?” he whispered. “Why did you have to leave us?” He fell silent, as if waiting for an answer to his oft-asked question; the silence of the graveyard wrapped around him like an icy sheet, making him shiver in the darkness.

His hand moved to the image of his sister, whose death had occurred on what would have been their mother’s thirty-third birthday.

This time a vision from the past came to his mind,
welling up from his memory as vividly as if he’d seen it all only yesterday.

He and Mallory were both very small—no more than three or so—and he was holding on to her hand as they ran across the lawn toward the forest. There was a spring in the woods, and the two of them used to love to go hide in the shrubbery that bordered the clear, racing stream and watch raccoons washing their food in the rushing water. Sometimes deer drank from its crystal surface.

If they were feeling particularly brave, he and Mallory would sometimes take off their shoes and socks and wade in the cold water welling out of the ground, even though their father had warned them that if they slipped and fell in, they could easily drown.

But they hadn’t ever slipped; hadn’t ever—

The stab of pain slashed through Oliver’s head so suddenly that he staggered back from the crypt, and the vision of his sister vanished in the blackness that instantly closed around him.

A point of light appears in the blackness
.

The boy stares at it. As he focuses his mind on it, the point slowly begins to expand
.

Now it is as if he is looking into a tunnel
.

At the end of the tunnel he sees a coffin
.

The boy emerges from the tunnel. He is in a church, staring at a coffin
.

A small coffin
.

Small enough that even he would barely fit in it
.

Hands lift him up, holding him high, so that he can look down into the coffin
.

He sees a face
.

His sister’s face
.

As he stares a
t
it, his eyes wide, blood oozes from his sister’s neck
.

Shuddering as the headache slowly released him from its grip, Oliver pressed his hand against the glass covering his sister’s image.

“Oh, God, why can’t I remember? What’s happening to me?” he cried, his voice breaking.

His eyes streaming with tears, his breath catching in his throat, Oliver turned away from the mausoleum and started the long walk back home.

Germaine had no idea how long it had taken her to descend the apparently endless staircase. Time itself lost its meaning as she flailed against the terrors that surrounded her. Cowering at the foot of the stairs, she gazed into the pit, mesmerized. What had been an enormous and lush Oriental carpet bearing an intricate pattern of flowers, vines, leaves and birds was now a pulsating, writhing, living mass that throbbed with a hypnotic rhythm and threatened to draw her irretrievably into its deadly grasp. Vines grew before her very eyes, their tendrils reaching out to twist around her ankles. Snakes slithered among the vines, their undulating bodies nearly indistinguishable from the sinews of the plants themselves. A whimper escaped Germaine’s lips as she tried to turn away from the hideous vision, but the jungle before her held her in its thrall.

A glistening drop of saliva oozed from the corner of her mouth, but Germaine was as oblivious to it as she now was to the blood that dripped from the gashes on her legs.

The jungle dropped away, consumed by the black bottomless pit that opened before her. A wave of vertigo
Struck Germaine as she stared into the abyss, and she flung one arm out to try to steady herself, succeeding only in smashing her hand against the hard wood of the newel-post at the base of the stairs. The sudden bone-jarring pain in her hand cost her what little was left of her equilibrium. Her balance deserted her.

Screaming, she plunged into the blackness far below. As she fell she could see the writhing snakes, their mouths gaping, fangs dripping with venom, straining upward as if to strike her even before she crashed to the ground.

Then they were all over her, twisting around her, binding her arms and legs. She couldn’t breathe; her skin was crawling. Twisting. Turning. Screaming. Vipers churning over her. She tried to move her arms, her legs. Trapped. Immobile. Paralyzed. Screaming—screams of pain and terror. Then only utter despair.

Clara Wagner finally picked up the remote control and muted the volume on her television set. As the sound of the late news died away, the wailing from beyond her door became clearer, and her brow furrowed in irritation. What on earth was going on out there?

Was someone crying, or shouting?

It must be Germaine and Rebecca.

What on earth were they doing?

But of course she knew! Rebecca had undoubtedly done something stupid again, and Germaine would have corrected her. Now the silly child was crying. Well, it would have to stop.

Now.

Turning her chair toward the door, she rolled across the room, then struggled to open the heavy mahogany panel, one hand clutching the doorknob while she used the other to manipulate the chair’s controls. As the door slowly swung open, the sounds grew louder. “For heaven’s sake,”
Clara began as she rolled the chair out onto the broad mezzanine that encircled the huge entry hall below. “What on earth—”

The words died on her lips. Below her, she saw Germaine writhing on the carpet that was spread out over the broad expanse between the front door and the base of the stairs.

What in heaven’s name was she doing? Had she fallen down the stairs?

“Germaine?
Germaine!”

The screech echoing through the jungle galvanized Germaine. She lunged to her feet as she heard the as-yet-unseen beast crash toward her. Though the snakes still clung to her, and her vision was a red blur, with a preternatural strength born of sheer terror she jerked her limbs loose from the clutching vines and writhing vipers.

Hide.

She had to find someplace to hide.

Frantically turning first one way and then another, Germaine searched for someplace—anyplace—that would shelter her from the beast that was coming ever closer. Then, at last, she saw something.

A tree—a hollow tree.

Not much, but at least something.

The vines still dragging at her, the snakes still twisting around her, she struggled toward the shelter, finally dropping to all fours to slog her way across the mire the floor had become.

Then, as the beast roared again, she whimpered and redoubled her efforts.

*  *  *

“Germaine!”

Clara Wagner glared furiously down at her daughter. What on earth was she doing? Obviously she wasn’t badly hurt, since she’d gotten up, taken a few steps, then dropped back down as if she were simply too dizzy to stand.

Dizzy!

Of course!

Germaine was drunk! That had to be it! After the scene she’d caused in the parlor, she’d gone back to her room and begun drinking.

It didn’t surprise Clara—didn’t surprise her at all. She’d always suspected Germaine was a secret drinker. Typical of the kind of person Germaine had turned out to be, despite how hard she had worked to raise her properly, and the sacrifices she’d made to make certain that Germaine had all the advantages. But the girl had always been a disappointment.

Maybe if she’d been pretty enough to snare a husband—

Too late now! Germaine would never be anything but an old-maid librarian.

But she would not be a drunk!

“I’m coming down there, Germaine!” Clara called over the edge of the mezzanine. “I’m coming down, and if I find out you’ve been drinking …”

She left the sentence hanging unfinished as she maneuvered the wheelchair toward the elevator. Angrily, she jerked at the accordion door of the brass cage. Finally pulling it open, she wheeled herself inside, then jabbed at the button that would send the cage down to the first floor.

The renewed roaring of the beast spurring her on, Germaine burst free of the vines and scrabbled across to the
shelter of the hollow tree, no more than a rotting stump, its bark filled with holes. Drawing her knees to her breast and wrapping her arms around them, she closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. Her breath was coming in short gasps; every part of her body hurt now. Her skin felt as if millions of insects were crawling over it, and blood was smeared everywhere.

Sobbing and whimpering, she tried to shrink herself into an even smaller ball and clamp both her eyes and her ears shut against the terrors that surrounded her. Then a new sound penetrated the fog that was gathering in her mind.

A terrible clanking and groaning. The beast! Moving toward her. Against her will, she opened her eyes and looked up.

An enormous boulder—so huge it filled the entire hollowed trunk of the tree—was dropping toward her.

Germaine screamed in terror.

As her daughter’s scream pierced the armor of anger in which Clara Wagner had wrapped herself, she realized with horror exactly where Germaine had chosen to hide from her mother’s wrath. She reached out for the elevator’s control, but the wheelchair had lodged itself against the back wall, one wheel jammed firmly into a crevice in the metal latticework, and her fingers hovered just short of the button that would stop the cage’s descent. She fumbled wildly for the panel on the chair’s right arm, but Clara’s now-trembling fingers missed their target, and her heart began to beat erratically as she realized what was about to happen.

Then her fingers found the wheelchair’s controls and pushed hard.

The motor hummed; the chair shuddered but did not
budge. The back wheel remained tightly jammed between the ornate ironwork struts of the cage.

Clara struggled harder, pushing at the cage itself in an effort to free the chair, but she had long ago let her muscles go far too flaccid to obey her commands now.

She leaned forward, stretching toward the elevator button, her heart racing wildly.

A stab of pain slashed through her head and her whole body stiffened. Then, as Germaine uttered yet another howl of pure terror, a great fist of pain smote Clara’s head and she slumped in her chair.

Germaine’s terrified howl rose into a scream of pure agony.

The cry built, rising through the great entry hall, expanding to fill the house. The air trembled with it, and then, so suddenly that even the silence that followed seemed to echo, it ended.

So also did the clanking of the elevator, and the grinding of the machine that ran it.

For a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, silence reigned.

Then, as the pain that had crashed down on her slowly lifted, Clara Wagner moaned.

She tried to cry out—tried to call for help—but no words emerged from her lips.

Instead there was only an unintelligible stream of meaningless sound.

She tried to move.

As the worst terror she had ever felt closed around her, Clara Wagner realized that she was no longer in her wheelchair by choice.

R
ebecca was running, and even though she couldn’t see her pursuer, she knew exactly what it was.