The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,130

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.

Chapter 3

“Go 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