The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,180

there when you came for me.”

“But you don’t understand—” Oliver began again.

Rebecca took both his hands in her own. “I do understand,” she said. “I understand that you love me, and I understand that I love you. And that’s all there is.” When Oliver tried to speak again, she shook her head, repeating, “That’s all there is.”

Oliver gazed into Rebecca’s face for a long time, then finally tore his eyes away to look at Steve Driver and Philip Margolis. Regardless of what Rebecca had said, they must have understood the truth.

But Steve Driver was tearing his notes from his pad, and while he slid the notebook itself back into the inside pocket of his jacket, Philip Margolis spoke for both of them.

“It’s her word against yours, Oliver,” the doctor said. “And we all know that Rebecca doesn’t lie. She just plain doesn’t.”

Finally, Oliver put his arms around Rebecca and pulled her close, his lips nuzzling her hair as she clung to him. But then he caught a glimpse of the Asylum looming on top of the hill outside the window. He released Rebecca from his embrace and his expression hardened. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

Leaving the house, Oliver strode up the hill to the spot where the wrecking ball still stood, waiting for the work to proceed. Climbing into the seat in front of its controls, he found the starter switch, and the machine’s engine roared to life. He studied the controls, then began working the various levers.

A moment later the enormous lead ball swung back on its cable, paused for an instant at the end of its arc, then moved again, gaining momentum as Oliver aimed it at the great stone edifice.

As the ball smashed into the wall, glass shattered and rock exploded in every direction.

Again and again Oliver sent the ball crashing against the Asylum’s wall. With every blow a little more of the pain his father had inflicted on him when he was a boy was finally relieved.

The battering went on and on, until, too weak to stand any longer, the prisonlike wall of the Blackstone Asylum collapsed.

Oliver Metcalf at last was free.

Epilogue

The white clapboard Congregational church, with its high steeple and brass bell, had stood guard over Blackstone for more than two centuries. Now, as the bell began to toll the hour of four, nearly all the citizens of Blackstone left their homes and began moving slowly toward the cemetery, as if drawn by the stately, mournful gong, inexorably, like iron filings to a magnet. They came from all directions, from the “College Streets” of Harvard, Princeton, and Amherst, north of the square, and from the less grand thoroughfares that lay in a grid to the south. As ancient custom dictated, they congregated briefly in the square itself, neighbors greeting neighbors, lifelong friends chatting quietly for a few minutes before gathering into larger groups that moved west toward the white picket fence that surrounded the graveyard.

It had been three days since Harvey Connally had died; three days since Oliver Metcalf had carried Rebecca Morrison out of the Asylum.

Three days since Oliver had taken the controls of the wrecking ball and smashed the wall of the Asylum itself.

Three days in which more rumors had crept through the streets of Blackstone, moving from house to house, passed from lip to ear in whispers so quiet that the words could barely be understood. Where the tale began—which mouth first uttered the words—no one could say, for it is never possible to trace a rumor back to its first seed. But by four P.M. on this cloud-darkened afternoon, when it was finally time to lay Harvey Connally’s body to rest, there was barely a soul in Blackstone who had not heard the story. A legend was taking root.

A legend about a man who, throughout his entire lifetime, the town had honored and held in great esteem.

A man who, in death, was taking on a new role, a role he would undoubtedly continue to play through the decades—perhaps even centuries—to come.

Harvey Connally, the rumor proclaimed, had been the one who delivered the gifts, and with them the curse on half a dozen of Blackstone’s oldest families, including his own.

“It’s crazy,” Bill McGuire said when someone—he could no longer remember exactly who—had first whispered it to him. “Harvey could never have done such a thing.” But by the end of the day, when he’d gone into the library to gaze upon the