The Blackstone Chronicles (45 page)

She clearly remembered an arm, sticking out from under the elevator.

Had Miss Clara been in the elevator?

She thought so, but even that wasn’t clear.

She remembered running out into the night—she must have been trying to get help—but after that, everything was a blank.

The next thing she remembered was slowly waking up, not knowing whether she was awake or trapped in a dream of wakefulness.

She’d been cloaked in darkness, plunged into a blackness so deep it had seemed she was drowning in it, unable even to catch her breath. When her mind had cleared enough for her to realize she was not dreaming, was not dying, but was awakening instead in some strange,
lightless place, her first terrified thought was that she’d been buried alive.

A wave of panic overwhelmed her. She tried to scream, but all that emerged was a muffled groan that jammed in her throat, causing her to cough and choke.

Taped!

Her mouth was taped, so she couldn’t give vent to the coughing, and for a second it seemed as if her head might actually explode. Finally, though, she’d managed to control the coughing—she still wasn’t sure how.

Slowly—very slowly—her panic had eased, only to give way to something even worse.

The tape wasn’t just over her mouth—it bound her wrists and ankles as well.

She was on a floor—a hard floor, covered with no rugs or carpeting. In the total blackness, she could not judge how large or small the room she was in might be.

A silence as deep as the blackness surrounded her. As time crawled endlessly on, the eerie quiet became as frightening as the dark.

Then the cold began to wrap itself around her.

It was a cold she’d barely noticed when she first came awake. But as the minutes and hours slithered by, and she could neither hear nor see, the cold, her sole companion, edged closer and closer, engulfing her in its clammy arms, slowly invading not only her body but her spirit as well.

Soon it had seeped into her very bones so her whole body ached. No matter how she tried to writhe away from it, there was no escape.

Sleep became impossible, for whenever exhaustion and terror overcame her, and her mind finally retreated into unconsciousness for a moment or two, the nightmares that thrived on the cold chased after her, torturing her even in her sleep so that when once again she came awake, body and spirit woke even more debilitated than before.

Her sense of time deserted her; day and night had long since lost their meaning.

In the first hours—or perhaps even days—she’d thought she might starve to death. When she first awakened, she had been far too terrified even to think about food or water, but even fear must eventually give way to hunger. At some point the ache induced by the increasing cold had been punctuated by pangs of hunger, stabbings that eventually settled into a dull agony that attacked her mind as efficiently as it ravaged her body.

With the hunger had come thirst, a parching so powerful she thought she would die from it. How long would it take to die? How much longer before hunger, or thirst, or some unnamed evil that would strike from out of the darkness brought deliverance from this unending agony?

The hunger and thirst, and the terror of the darkness, the emptiness, and the nightmares would go on until she finally sank into an oblivion that, she knew, would be welcome once it came.

But until then …

A sob rose in her throat, but she quickly put it down, knowing it would only choke her once it rose high enough. And when she felt hot wetness flooding her eyes, she battled against it, refusing to waste so much as a single drop of water on something as useless as tears.

The very effort required to wrestle against her raging emotions somehow put her terror under control, and after an interminable period of time—Rebecca had no idea how long it might have been—she finally conquered the worst of the demons that had come to her out of the darkness.

Over and over again she told herself that she was still alive, and that soon—very soon—someone would come and rescue her.

But how long would
soon
be?

There was no way of knowing.

Again, she shook off a demon nightmare brought on by the cold and roused herself from the fitful sleep into which she’d fallen. But the moment she came awake, she knew that something had changed.

Something in the quality of the darkness was different, and she knew with utter certainty that she was no longer alone.

She lay perfectly still, holding every muscle in check, not daring even to breathe as she listened to the silence.

It too had changed.

No longer the empty, eerie silence she had awakened into before, now there seemed to be something—something not-quite-audible—lurking just beyond the range of her hearing.

And her skin was crawling, as if some primeval sixth sense detected watching eyes that her own could not see.

Her heart raced; her pulse throbbed in her ears.

Whatever lurked in the darkness drew closer.

An icy sheen of sweat oozed from Rebecca’s pores, making her skin slick with fear.

And then she felt the touch.

A shriek rose in her throat as something so feather-light as almost not to be there at all brushed against her face, but once again the tape securing her mouth cut off her cry, and her howl of terror was strangled into a whimper.

The touch came again, and then, finally, the silence was broken.

“The beginning. This is only the beginning.” The words were spoken with so little voice that they could have been no more than the whisper of a breeze, but in the silent darkness they echoed and resounded, filling Rebecca once more with indescribable terror.

The voice whispered again.

“Cry out if you want to. No one can hear you. No one would care if they could.”

Then she felt the touch once more.

It was firmer this time, and it instantly brought back a terrible memory.

She had fled the house to get help. She was racing up Amherst Street, intent on getting to Oliver’s house at the very top, just inside the gates to the old Asylum. And suddenly—with no warning—an arm had snaked around her neck and a hand had clamped over her mouth.

A hand, she had realized just before terror overcame her, that was covered in thin latex.

The same thin latex that covered the unseen finger now stroking her cheek.

The tape was ripped from her mouth.

Instinctively, Rebecca opened her mouth to scream, but before even the slightest sound came out, a voice inside her head gave her a warning:

He wants you to scream. He wants to hear your fear
.

Exercising the control she had somehow gathered around her during the endless hours of cold and darkness, Rebecca remained utterly silent.

As she had for hours—perhaps days—she waited quietly in the dark.

The silence grew—stretched endlessly on. Though she could hear nothing, Rebecca could sense the growing fury of her tormentor.

She decided she would not give him whatever it was he wanted from her.

Not now.

Not ever.

Finally she spoke.

“You might as well kill me,” she said, somehow managing to keep her voice from quavering even a little bit. “If that’s what you’re going to do, you might as well do it right now.”

Again silence hung in the darkness like an almost palpable mass, but just as Rebecca thought she could stand it no more, the whisper drifted out of the void.

“You’ll wish I had,” it breathed. “Soon you’ll wish I had.”

She’d braced herself then, uncertain what to expect next.

All that happened was that the tape was put back on her mouth, and the hours of silence and darkness began again.

Now and then he came back.

He brought her water.

He brought her food.

He did not speak.

Neither did she.

Slowly, she explored the room in which she was being held, creeping across the floor like some kind of larva, snuffling in the corners with her nose, touching what she could with her fingers, though her wrists were still bound behind her back.

Every surface she touched was cold and smooth.

The room was totally empty.

She no longer knew how many times she had crept around its perimeter and crisscrossed its floor, searching for something—anything—that might tell her where she was.

There was nothing.

Then, a little while ago, the silence had finally been truly broken.

She heard footsteps, and the muffled sound of voices, and for the first time since she’d found herself in the silent blackness, she tried to cry out.

Tried, and failed, frustrated by the thick tape that covered her mouth.

A little later she heard the muffled sounds again, and once more she struggled against the tape, trying to rub it off against the floor, but finding nothing that would catch its edge long enough for her to rip it free.

Then the voices faded away, and the black silence once again closed around her.

“G
o all the way down by the garage,” Ed Becker told Bill McGuire. “My back’s already starting to hurt, and the closer we get to the basement stairs, the better.”

Bill McGuire glanced over at the attorney. “Still got a coal bin? Maybe we could just slide it right on down. At least then it’ll be in the right place when you decide to shove it in the furnace.”

“Very funny,” Becker groused. “But when I’m done, you won’t even recognize it.”

“Exactly my point,” the contractor taunted. He slowed the pickup to a stop about ten feet from the Beckers’ garage, and swung out of the cab just as the back door flew open and Ed’s five-year-old daughter, Amy, came barreling out, closely followed by Riley, a six-month-old Labrador puppy that Amy had managed to convince her parents was “absolutely the only thing I want for Christmas. If I can just have a puppy, I promise I’ll never ask for anything else again as long as I live so-help-me-God.” While the campaign had worked sufficiently well so that the puppy had, indeed, taken up residence in the Becker house, Amy’s father had yet to overcome the fear of dogs from which he’d suffered since he was his daughter’s age. As the comparatively nonthreatening eight-week-old ball of fluff that Riley had been upon arrival developed into the immensely menacing—at least to Ed Becker—forty-pound medicine-ball-with-feet that Riley now was, Ed had become increasingly wary of his
daughter’s pet. Now, as Riley did his best to climb into Ed’s arms and administer one of his specialty soggy face licks, the attorney who had never quailed before the most irate judge or angry client cowered away from the puppy’s enthusiastic onslaught.

“Put him in the house, Amy,” Ed ordered, reaching for authority although his guts seemed to have turned to Jell-O.

“He won’t hurt you, Daddy,” Amy replied with enough scorn to make her father blush. “He’s just being friendly. He loves you!”

“Well, I don’t love him,” Ed muttered, now fending the dog off with both arms.

Riley, yapping happily and utterly unaware of the havoc he was wreaking on Ed’s intestines, kept leaping at Ed’s chest, enjoying the intricacies of this new game.

“Riley,
down!”
Bonnie Becker commanded as she thrust open the back door and joined the group around the pickup truck. The dog instantly dropped to the ground, though his entire body quivered with barely suppressed excitement as he gazed adoringly up at Ed. “Take him inside, Amy,” Bonnie told her daughter. “Can’t you see he’s scaring your father half to death?”

Ed’s embarrassed flush deepened as his daughter grasped the dog by the collar and began pulling him toward the house. Though the Lab, only a few inches shorter and no lighter than the little girl, could have dug in and refused to go, he happily submitted to his small mistress’s tugging. Child and pet disappeared back into the house, and Ed, his courage fully restored now that the puppy was nowhere to be seen, attempted to recover a little of his dignity. “I am
not
afraid of him,” he declared. “It’s just that he’s so big, he could hurt someone! He has to learn not to jump all over people!”

His wife nodded gravely. “You’re absolutely right,” Bonnie agreed. “Why don’t you train him?”

Ed attempted a scathing look, failed miserably, then
flushed even redder when Bonnie giggled. “It’s not funny!” he insisted, though now his own lips were starting to twitch. “He could really hurt someone!”

“Oh, he really could,” Bill McGuire agreed, his expression deliberately deadpan. “I know I was scared out of my mind.” He winked at Bonnie. “Did you see the nasty way his tail was wagging?”

“And the way his lips curled back when he tried to lick Ed’s face,” Bonnie added. “That was pretty scary.”

“Oh, all right,” Ed groused, finally recognizing he was going to get no sympathy. “So when it comes to dogs, I’m a wimp. So sue me.” He went around to the tailgate of the truck, pulled it down, and began struggling with the big oak dresser. “You two going to help me with this, or would you rather just poke fun at me all day?”

“Poking fun sounds good to me,” Bill McGuire said. “How about you, Bonnie?”

“I always think poking fun beats hauling junk furniture around,” Bonnie agreed.