The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,175

up tight under his chin as he let his imagination run wild, seeing all kinds of wonderful things in the dark shapes on the walls. He liked that kind of darkness.

Some nights he imagined he was in a tent in the jungle, and the shadows he was seeing were cast by lions and tigers and elephants.

But the darkness in which he awakened this time was different.

An empty, scary kind of darkness.

The kind of darkness that made him think that things he couldn’t see were watching him.

The kind of darkness that made him shiver, even though it wasn’t cold.

“Daddy?” he called out, keeping his voice soft enough so that if there were any wild animals lurking in the darkness, they might not hear him.

There was no answer. As Oliver came fully awake, he realized he wasn’t in his bed at all.

He wasn’t even in his room.

And his whole body was sore.

The blackness turned to a funny gray color; then, as it grew brighter, became a bright, blinding white, as a powerful, naked bulb switched on.

White tiles on the floor. And on the wall.

White paint on the ceiling.

And then his father’s face, looming above him, flanked by two big men in white coats.

“You’re not a very good boy, Oliver,” his father said. “You’re a bad boy. A very bad boy, who killed his sister.”

“I didn’t!” Oliver cried. “I—”

Before he could finish his sentence, his father pressed a button in a wooden box. Oliver convulsed as the jolt of electricity passed through him. Then, as his body relaxed, he cried:

“No!”

His father pressed the button again. This time as the shock shuddered through him, a gush of vomit spewed from his mouth.

“Clean him,” Oliver’s father said, and the two men in white coats stepped over to the table and began wiping the vomit away with a towel.

His father pressed the button again. He was sobbing now, whimpering, his stomach churning, his throat filling with bile as his body reacted to the torture.

Then, in a small voice that seemed to come from somewhere outside himself, Oliver heard himself say, “I’ve been a bad boy. A very bad boy.”

“That’s right,” his father said. “A very bad boy. And now I’m going to tell you why you’re a bad boy, and what you did.”

His breath coming in short, shallow gasps, Oliver listened as his father explained how he had taken the razor and what he had done with it. His father’s voice droned on and on, and as he spoke, tears came into Oliver’s eyes.

Tears of sorrow, and tears of shame.

And at last, when it was over, and he understood everything his father had told him, he slipped from the white tiled room and pulled the door closed behind him. Outside in the corridor the cries and screams that had echoed through the building for so long could still be heard, but not by Oliver Metcalf.

All he could hear as he slowly mounted the stairs toward the first floor was the sound of his father’s voice, repeating over and over what he, a very bad boy, had done.

And telling him what still was left to do.

Chapter 9

Rebecca Morrison was staring at the face of Death.

She had no conscious memory of when the apparition had appeared; nor did she have any idea how long she had been gazing upon it.

It was simply there, hanging in front of her in the darkness.

It was a pale, bloodless face, almost lost in the folds of a deep hood whose black cloth blended into the surrounding darkness so perfectly that the face itself seemed almost to be a part of the blackness. Though there seemed to be no source of light, the face was limned in shadows, shadows that moved and seemed to shimmer with a life of their own.

Yet the face was dead.

Wattles of skin hung around the neck, and the jaw was slack, causing a lipless maw to gape wide, exposing the rotted teeth within. The tongue, covered with open sores, was coated with a yellowish goo that strung out to the broken teeth like strands of a spiderweb; a spiderlike creature, fat and mottled black-brown, lurked deep in the specter’s throat, crawling out long enough for Rebecca to catch only a glimpse of it before scuttling back down into its fleshy lair. The creature set Rebecca’s flesh crawling, with its multiple hairy legs and the grizzly morsels that hung from its curving, dripping mandibles.

Above the maw a great beaked nose curved out from a sloping brow, its grayish skin