and after dominating the town for a full century, the building would finally be torn apart, its stone walls demolished, its turrets fallen, its green copper roof sold off for scrap.
As Oliver stepped through the ornate wrought-iron gates that pierced the fence surrounding the Asylum’s entire ten acres, and started up the wide, curving driveway leading to its front door, an arm fell across his shoulders and he heard his uncle’s familiar voice.
“Quite a day, wouldn’t you say, Oliver?” Harvey Connally said, his booming, hearty voice belying his eighty-three years.
Oliver’s gaze followed his uncle’s, fixing on the brooding building, and he wondered what was going through the old man’s mind. No point in asking; for despite their closeness, he’d always found his uncle far more comfortable discussing ideas than emotions.
“If you talk about emotions, you have to talk about people,” Harvey had told him back when he was only ten or eleven years old, and home from boarding school for Christmas. “And talking about people is gossip. I don’t gossip, and you shouldn’t either.” The words had clearly signaled Oliver that there were many things his uncle did not want to discuss.
Still, as the old man gazed up at the building that had risen on North Hill only a few years before his birth, Oliver couldn’t help trying one last time.
“Your father built it, Uncle Harvey,” he said softly. “Aren’t you just a little sorry to see it go?”
His uncle’s grip tightened on his shoulder. “No, I’m not,” Harvey Connally replied, his voice grating as he spoke the words. “And neither should you be. Good riddance to it, is what I say, and we should all forget everything that ever happened there.”
His hand fell from Oliver’s shoulder.
“Everything,” he said again.
Half an hour later Oliver stood at the podium that had been erected in front of the Asylum’s imposing portico, his eyes surveying the crowd. Nearly everyone had come. The president of the bank was there, as was the contractor whose company would demolish most of the old Asylum, keeping only the facade. The plan was to replace the interior with a complex of shops and restaurants that promised to bring a prosperity to Blackstone that no one had known since the years when the institution itself had provided the economic basis for the town’s livelihood. Everyone who was involved in the project was there, but there were others as well, people whose parents and grandparents, even great-grandparents, had once worked within the stone walls behind him. Now they hoped that the new structure might provide their children and grandchildren with jobs.
Beyond the assemblage, just inside the gate, Oliver could see the small stone house that had been deeded to the last superintendent of the Asylum, upon the occasion of his marriage to the daughter of the chairman of the Asylum’s board of directors.
When the Blackstone Asylum had finally been abandoned and its last superintendent had died, that house, too, stood empty for several years. Then the young man who had inherited it, having graduated from college, returned to Blackstone and moved back into that house, the house in which he’d been born.
Oliver Metcalf had come home.
He hadn’t expected to sleep at all on that first night, but to his surprise, the two-story stone cottage seemed to welcome him back, and he’d immediately felt as if he was home. The ghosts he’d expected had not appeared, and within a few years he almost forgot he’d ever lived anywhere else. But in all the years since then, living in the shadow of the Asylum his father had once run, Oliver had not once set foot inside the building.
He’d told himself he had no need to.
Deep in his heart, he’d known he couldn’t.
Something inside its walls—something unknowable—terrified him.
Now, as the crowd fell into an expectant silence, Oliver adjusted the microphone and began to speak.
“Today marks a new beginning in the history of Blackstone. For nearly a century, a single structure has affected every family—every individual—in our town. Today, we begin the process of tearing that structure down. This signifies not only the end of one era, but the beginning of another. The process of replacing the old Blackstone Asylum with the new Blackstone Center will not be simple. Indeed, when the new building is finally completed, its facade will look much as the Asylum looks today; constructed of the same stones that have stood on this site for nearly a hundred years, it will look familiar to all of us, but at the