The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,152

heads of eight of Ed Becker’s clients stared at him with empty eyes. Their lips were stretched back from their teeth in grim parodies of smiles, and pools of blood filled the plates upon which they sat.

“No!” The word caught in his throat and emerged only as a strangled grunt. Backing out of the dining room, he turned to flee, but instead of taking him out of the house, his legs carried him up the stairs until he stood at the door to the master bedroom. His heart pounded. He tried to make himself turn away from the closed door, to go back down the stairs, to leave the house.

Powerless to stop himself, he reached out and pushed the door open. As it swung back on its hinges, the room was revealed, not as the cheerful sunshine yellow space Bonnie had made it, but as a dark chamber dominated by an ornate four-poster bed, its curtains drawn back to reveal a heavy brocade coverlet.

Then he saw the figure of the man.

He recognized it instantly, for its face was bathed in silvery light pouring in from the window.

Ed Becker was staring at himself.

And he was hanging, broken-necked, from the chandelier. The hands of the lifeless corpse reached out as if to grasp the living man and draw him too into the cold grip of death.

A scream of horror rose from Ed Becker’s lungs, boiling out of him, echoing through the room, shattering the night.

Chapter 9

For a second Ed Becker didn’t know where he was. His mind still half entangled in the nightmare, he tried to twist away from the clawlike grasp of the dream. The terrible vision remained before him; he could still hear his own howling scream. Beside him, though, Bonnie slept quietly. As he sat up, willing his heartbeat to slow, his thoughts to focus, she sighed and snuggled deeper into the quilt, but did not wake.

Imagination. These hideous images were merely the product of mental stress—the culmination of months of anxiety over the awful tragedies among his friends, his worries over the fate of the Blackstone Center, capped by the close call they’d had tonight.

Imagination—overwrought and out of control.

Ed got out of bed and went to the window, where he could just make out the silhouette of his house against the starlit darkness of the sky. “It really was just a dream,” he said quietly, repeating his wife’s comforting words to himself like a mantra. A dream. Just a dream.

But he knew he didn’t believe it.

Knew he had to see for himself.

Even as he opened the front door, he could sense that something had changed.

Everything about the house was different.

The way it smelled.

The way it felt.

He reached for the light switch, remembering the power had been turned off only when there was no response to his touch. Making his way through the foyer, he came to the dining room door. Though it was almost pitch-black, he could see the vague outline of a table and chairs.

Big, heavy furniture, unlike the teak set he and Bonnie had brought with them from Boston.

An illusion!

It had to be an illusion, born of the darkness and the memory of the dream. But then, as he remembered the vision of his clients’ severed heads displayed on the table, he backed away from the dining room. Crossing the threshold into the living room, he stopped.

The room was not empty.

He could feel the presence of someone—or something—waiting in the space that yawned before him. As in the dream, he tried to turn away and leave the house.

But also as in the dream, his body refused to respond to the desires of his mind, and he found himself drawn inexorably into the room and the blackness beyond.

And then he knew.

They were everywhere. They sat in every Victorian chair, perched on every footstool, and leaned against every gateleg table and curio cabinet.

Two of them flanked the fireplace.

He could see at once that they were all dead. Pale, motionless, they somehow managed to stare at him accusingly with their sightless eyes.

Then, the wail. A low keening that slowly built into a cacophony of pain and suffering.

Ed recognized them all, for during the last fifteen years, he had studied photographs of every one of them. They were the victims of his clients, now gathered in his home, come at last to settle their accounts with the man who had defended their killers.

His heart pounding, Ed turned away and lurched toward the front door, only to find himself staring into