The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,32

pry her fingers loose from the tiny piece of jewelry, her own hand went to her mouth.

In an instant, she swallowed the locket.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she heard the “doctor” say, but it didn’t matter, because now the locket was safely out of his reach.

Lorena, knowing she’d won, began to laugh. Her laughter built, filling the room with a raucous sound that didn’t die away until three “orderlies” came in and circled around her. Then Lorena’s laughter suddenly became a scream of terror.

* * *

They were in a room in the basement of the Asylum. It was equipped with a metal table. Above the table a bright light was suspended.

The orderlies, having strapped the patient to the table, had disappeared. Now, as the woman gazed at the patient’s terrified eyes, she wished she’d never come here today.

Indeed, she wished she’d never met the doctor at all.

“Perhaps you should wait outside,” he said.

Making no reply, the woman started out of the room, but before she passed through the doorway, she turned around and glanced back.

A scalpel glimmered in her lover’s hand.

Stepping quickly out of the room, the woman pulled the door closed behind her as if the act alone could shut what she’d just seen out of her mind. But the scream she heard a moment later seared the scene into her memory forever.

The first scream was followed by another, and then another, and for just an instant the woman was certain that someone would appear, would burst from the stairs at the end of the corridor to stop whatever was happening behind the closed door.

But no one came. Slowly, the screams died away, to be replaced by a deathly silence.

At last, when she thought she could take it no more, the door opened and the doctor stepped out. Before he pulled the door closed behind him, the woman caught a glimpse of the room beyond.

The patient, her face gray, still lay strapped to the operating table.

Her eyes, open and lifeless, seemed to be staring at the woman.

Blood oozed from her eviscerated belly, and crimson threads were strung from the edge of the table to the scarlet pool on the floor.

The door closed.

The doctor pressed the locket into the woman’s hand, still warm with the heat of the patient’s body.

The woman gazed at it for a second, then dropped it to the floor. Turning, she staggered toward the stairs, not looking back.

When she was gone, the doctor picked the locket up, wiped it clean, and dropped it in his pocket.

Chapter 1

There was nothing about the First National Bank of Blackstone that Jules Hartwick didn’t love. It was a passion that had begun when he was a very small boy and his father brought him down to the Bank for the first time. The memory of that first visit remained vividly sharp through the half century that had since passed. Even now Jules could recall the awe with which, as a child of three, he had first beheld the gleaming polished walnut of the desks and the great slabs of green-veined marble that topped all the counters.

But the brightest memory of that day—brighter than any other memory he had—was of the fascination that came over him when he’d seen the great door to the vault standing open, the intricate works of its locking mechanism clearly visible through a glass plate on the inside of the door. Every shiny piece of brass had captivated him, and over and over he’d begged Miss Schmidt, who had been his father’s secretary right up until the day she died, to work the combination yet again so he could watch the tumblers fall, the levers work, and the huge pins that held the enormous door fast in its frame move in and out.

Half a century later, nothing had changed. The Bank (somehow, Jules always capitalized the word in his own mind) was no different now than it had been back then. Some of the marble showed a few chips, and there were some nicks in the walnut, but the tellers’ cages were still fronted by the same flimsy brass grills that offered little in the way of security but a great deal in the way of atmosphere, and the huge vault door still stood open all day, allowing the Bank’s customers to enjoy the beauty of its inner workings as much as Jules had on that long-ago day. Had he been forced to make a choice, Jules would have been hard put to say which he