The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,125

wrap one of his chains around one of their necks …

For interminable seconds no one in the room moved. Then, very slowly, the three men began edging closer.

Every muscle in his body tensed; his face contorted with fury.

“You can’t win,” one of the men said softly. “You might as well not even try.” With a flick of his right hand that signaled his colleagues to act, he lunged for the boy.

Twenty minutes later, when the battle finally ended, the boy lay strapped to a gurney with thick bands of leather, his eyes still glittering with rage, his muscles knotting as he struggled against his bonds. Of the three men who had come for him, two had broken noses and the third a crushed hand. Although the patient had finally been controlled, he still had not been subdued.

“Do you understand what is going to happen to you?” the doctor asked. The boy glared up from the gurney and made no reply, except to spit in the doctor’s face. The doctor impassively wiped the glob of phlegm away from his cheek, then began reading aloud from a document that had been issued by the court six weeks earlier. When he finished his recitation, he glanced at the team around him. The three injured orderlies had been replaced by three others, and two nurses stood by. “Shall we proceed?”

The team in the operating room nodded their agreement. The orderlies moved the gurney into position next to an operating bench that had been constructed specifically for the procedure the doctor was about to carry out. A notch was cut in the bench, allowing the end of the gurney to slip under the open jaws of a large viselike clamp.

The boy’s head was held immobile as the jaws were tightened on his temples.

Using a pair of electrodes, the doctor administered a quick series of shocks to the boy’s head, and then, before the temporary anesthetic the shocks had provided could wear off, he went to work.

As a nurse peeled the boy’s right eyelid back, the doctor found his tear duct and inserted the needlelike point of a long pick into it. With a sharp rap to the other end of the pick, he drove the point of the instrument through the orbital plate. Measuring the distance carefully, the doctor slid the pick into the soft tissue inside the boy’s skull until its tip had sunk two full inches into his brain.

Satisfied that the tool was properly placed, the doctor expertly flicked it through a twenty-degree arc, tearing through the nerves of the frontal lobe.

The boy’s body relaxed on the gurney, and his twisted grimace of rage softened into a gentle smile.

The doctor withdrew the pick from the boy’s tear duct and nodded to one of the nurses. “That’s it. His eye might be sore for a day or so, but frankly, I doubt that he’ll even notice it.” His work done, the doctor left the operating room.

One of the nurses swabbed the boy’s eye with alcohol; the other taped a bandage over it.

While one of the orderlies released the clamps that held the boy’s head immobile, the other two loosened the leather straps that bound him.

The boy did nothing more than smile up at them.

Three days later, when the bandage was removed from the boy’s eye, he picked up the stereoscope and peered once more through its lenses.

The image of his room was still there, but it no longer looked the same, for when the doctor had plunged the pick into the boy’s brain, it had cut through the optic nerve. He no longer saw in three dimensions, so the illusion provided by the stereoscope was gone. It didn’t matter, though, for everything inside the boy’s head had changed.

His fantasies were gone. Never again would he be able to make his dreams come true.

The dark figure lingered in the cold, silent room, his fingers stroking the smooth mahogany of the stereoscope’s case. But he knew the moment had come. Reluctantly, with a last, loving caress to the satiny dark wood, he bent and placed the stereoscope in the fourth drawer of the oaken chest, sliding the drawer closed.

Soon—very soon—his gift would be in other hands. The hands carefully selected to receive it. Once more the past would return to haunt Blackstone.

Chapter 1

Ed Becker shuddered as he gazed up at the grimy stone facade of the Asylum. “Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of trying to turn this monstrosity into something nice makes any sense