In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 34

THE SPIRALING LIGHT of the first salvo of fireworks glittered into the sky, and a moment later the darkness of the night was shattered by the blindingly white petals of a sparkling chrysanthemum, its brilliance in the darkness punctuated by the thundering boom of the rocket’s explosion.

But Eric Brewster barely noticed.

Something terrible had happened!

He could feel it — feel the pain of it almost as if a blade had been plunged deep into his own belly. And yet the pain wasn’t inside him — it was somewhere else, somewhere nearby.

As the second rocket exploded in the sky, another stab of agony slashed through him, and for an instant he froze, every muscle in his body going rigid in response to the searing pain.

Next to him, he heard Tad Sparks gasp, but it wasn’t the kind of ecstatic sigh that was rising from Cherie Stevens’s throat. Tad’s gasp was the sound of shock, and when Eric turned to look at him, Tad’s eyes were wide and his mouth agape.

“She’s doing it,” Tad whispered. “She’s going to kill everyone!”

As if in response to Tad’s whispered words, a voice suddenly howled in Eric’s mind — a woman’s voice — the same voice he’d heard a moment ago. But now she was no longer whispering.

Now she was screaming!

“Kill her! Kill her now! Do it! Do what I say!”

Then another voice, a choking voice. “Five,” the voice whispered.

Another scream, but this time not from inside Eric’s own mind.

Then another choking syllable.

“Six.”

The third rocket burst overhead, but now Eric was utterly oblivious to what was happening in the sky. Instead he was running, his feet pounding on the ground, Tad and Kent racing after him. In an instant they were off the footbridge, and in another they had burst out of the woods onto the crowded lawn.

More rockets ignited the sky, and now the crowd was roaring with delight, but inside Eric’s head there was only one sound.

The sound of someone dying.

LAURIE KINGSFORD GAZED raptly at the explosion of fire, her two-month-old baby cradled against her breast. Only as the brilliance of the red, white, and blue flag began to fade did she finally look down into Ben’s tiny face. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to bring the baby at all, but Laurie had been so sure that her baby would love fireworks as much as she herself did that she’d ignored her mother’s warning. And she had been right — little Ben was staring straight up into the sky, his eyes so wide that Laurie could clearly see the reflection of the fireworks in his tiny pupils. As the sky brightened with the next salvo, Ben’s eyes looked like they were filled with swirling gold dust, and Laurie decided that she would watch the rest of the display only through the eyes of her baby.

That would be something to remember the rest of her life.

But a second later, before the burst of fire overhead had reached its zenith, the glittering reflection suddenly vanished from Ben’s sparkling eyes and Laurie could feel a looming presence just behind her.

Turning, she started to look up, but it was already too late — blessedly, Laurie didn’t even have time to see the axe slashing toward her head, let alone realize what was about to happen to her.

In an instant it was over.

The axe head slashed through Laurie’s skull so cleanly that the back of her head merely fell away, almost as if it had never been a part of her at all. Her expression was barely affected — perhaps, had anyone been looking directly at her, they would have seen a hint of surprise in her eyes. But even if it was there at all, it was gone in the tiniest fraction of a second, and as the light overhead reached its peak, the light of life in Laurie Kingsford’s eyes was snuffed away.

Ben, still cradled in his mother’s arms, began to scream, but his crying was quickly drowned out, first by the ecstatic cries of the crowd as they watched the fire in the sky, then by his mother herself as she tumbled face forward, her breasts pressing against his tiny face, her blood streaming over him from the unholy wound that only a moment ago had been the back of her head.

Logan gazed unseeingly down.

Above him, the brilliance of the sky finally began to fade.

Inside his head a woman’s voice pealed with laughter.

“Seventeen,” he said softly.

Then, as Laurie Kingsford slumped in a pool of her own blood, Logan moved on, already searching for the next target of Lizzie Borden’s axe.

ERIC STUMBLED, GRABBING the back of his head where the searing pain sliced through his brain as if by—

— as if by an axe!

He heard a dull voice. A dead voice.

“Seventeen.”

But the voice wasn’t like the other voices — not like the voices he’d heard when he was on the footbridge.

This voice was real!

As the pain started to fade from his head, he looked around, frantically searching for its source. But there were people everywhere — crowds of people, all of them staring up into the sky.

Then Eric saw him.

The man from the boat — the boat with the huge cross mounted in its bow.

The man with the wild gray hair and the full beard.

The man who was now swinging an axe back and forth as if cutting wheat with a scythe. But instead of grain and chaff falling to the ground around him, this reaper was leaving a grisly trail of pain and terror.

And death.

Now a babble of voices was rising in Eric’s head, but one single voice — the voice of the woman he’d heard on the bridge — rose above the rest.

“Yes!” the woman cried every time the axe slashed through flesh and bone. As the carnage grew and one victim after another fell beneath the bloodied weapon, a note of ecstasy crept into the woman’s voice. “Yes,” she moaned. “Oh, yes…”

Again and again the axe flashed, and Eric watched in horror as glimmering droplets of blood played among the fireflies swarming from the trees and embers falling from the sky.

And over it all — even over the howling voice of the woman whose ecstasy rose with every strike of the blade — another voice rose.

A voice keeping careful count of the dreadful carnage.

“Seventeen…eighteen…nineteen…twenty…”

LOGAN’S FEET TOOK on the same cadence as his voice as he trudged through the crowd, the axe swinging back and forth with every stride.

One after another, people fell away, the slickly bloodied steel slicing as cleanly through bone as the flesh that enveloped it.

“Don’t stop,” the woman moaned. “Don’t ever stop….”

Yet even as she spoke, Logan paused to wipe the blood from his face before it blinded him completely.

“More! More!” the woman howled. “Keep going! Kill them all!”

Logan swung the axe again, ripping it through the top of a young boy’s head even as the child raised his arms to fend off the weapon.

“Twenty-eight.”

All around Logan, people cheered at the spectacle in the sky, unaware of the massacre that was closing in from behind.

“

THERE! SEE THEM? The mother and the father and the little girl!”

Though the fireworks were exploding every second now and the cheers of the crowd were all around him, Eric recognized the voice in an instant.

Recognized it, and knew that only four people were hearing it.

He himself, Kent Newell, Tad Sparks…

And the man with the axe.

The unseen spirit behind the howling voice seemed to rise above all else, and suddenly not only did Eric hear her voice, but saw with her eyes as well.

Saw the people she had just chosen.

“My family,” she was raging now. “My mother and my father and my sister. My sister Emma!”

But the little girl Eric was seeing wasn’t her little sister at all, and her name wasn’t Emma.

Her name was Marci.

And she was his own little sister.

“Kill them,” Lizzie Borden’s voice implored. “Kill them now!”

MERRILL BREWSTER SLIPPED her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and drew her close as they gazed up at the spectacle in the sky. As the fireworks built toward their finale, she tried to remember ever having a more perfect Fourth of July, but even as the question formed in her mind, she knew the answer.

Never.

The day had been perfect, and she finally understood that Dan had been right — whatever had happened to Ellis Langstrom had nothing to do with her or her family, and for once she hadn’t let her fears ruin the summer for everyone.

As if reading her thoughts, Marci grinned up at her. “Now aren’t you happy we didn’t go home yesterday?” she asked.

Merrill smiled down at Marci, who was still dressed in her costume as the Statue of Liberty. “Very happy. Happier than you’ll ever know.”

“

KILL THEM!” LIZZIE commanded. “Kill them now!”

Logan lumbered toward the family that was still a dozen paces away, the steady stream of flashes from the sky lighting his way, the slashing axe, which was flickering as if lit by a strobe.

“Thirty-three. Thirty-four.”

ERIC CHARGED PAST the screaming, bleeding people whose cries were all but ignored by the mob whose attention was still focused on the spectacle in the sky.

“No!” he howled as Logan moved closer to his family, the axe rising high above Marci’s head while inside his own head Lizzie Borden’s voice screamed for more blood.

More death.

Ahead of him — just out of his reach — the rag-clad man stood poised with Lizzie Borden’s axe over his head, and in another moment—

A surge of panic triggered something deep inside Eric, and then he was leaping forward, his arms outstretched, the single word he’d uttered before now erupting from his throat with enough force to rise above the volley of fireworks that were pouring into the night sky as the finale began.

“NOOOOO!”

With an unnatural strength that came out of nowhere, Eric seized Logan’s arm and whipped him around.

Logan’s eyes — dead black orbs — fixed on him.

“Kill him!” Eric heard the voice command, and this time knew it was his own death she was demanding.

Jerking free from Eric’s grip, Logan raised the axe again.

But then he hesitated, and a faint glimmer flashed in his eyes.

“Kill him!” the voice screamed.

Now Kent and Tad appeared out of the crowd, hurling themselves on Logan, trying to bring him down, but the old man held his stance as if braced by some unseen force.

Eric grabbed at the axe handle — slippery with blood — and wrenched it free from Logan’s grip.

The voice howled: “Yes! Yes! You do it! I killed my family. Now it’s your turn!”

Eric’s eyes flicked toward Marci, who had finally turned away from the glory in the sky and now beheld the horror all around her. Her face paled and her mouth opened wide, but no sound came out.

Eric tore his eyes away from his little sister to look once more at Logan.

Their eyes met.

And their gazes held.

And in that moment when their eyes held each other’s, Eric understood everything.

Logan, his eyes finally coming back to life, nodded.

Tightening his grip on the axe, Eric raised it, then brought it down, sinking it deep into the old man’s shoulder.

Logan staggered, but held his stance, and as blood began to gush from his shoulder, he spoke.

Spoke so softly only Eric could hear.

“Thirty-eight.”

Time seemed to stand still, and once more the eyes of the boy met those of the man.

Once again, the man nodded.

As the voice inside his head screamed out against him, Eric raised the axe a second time, and plunged it deep into Logan’s gut.

Again the old man staggered, and this time he sank to the ground.

“Thirty-nine,” he whispered, as Kent and Tad fell on him, pinning him to the spot where he lay.

Eric was trembling now, and as he stood over the fallen man, he felt a terrible cold enter his body. The voice of the woman was still screaming, but the other voices were starting to fade away. And the man on the ground — the man he’d already struck twice with the axe, was staring up at him.

For the third time their eyes met.

For the third time, the man spoke. “Do it,” he whispered. “End it.”

As Kent and Tad held him down, Eric raised the axe a final time, then brought it down, its head swinging in a great arc before slicing though the old man’s neck to sink deep into the ground beneath the blood-soaked lawn.

“No!” the last, lone voice sighed inside Eric’s head. Then it fell silent, and Eric stared down at the severed head. The features were almost invisible behind the blood-matted beard, but as the fireworks above began to fade away, Eric was certain he saw the lips move.

“Forty.”

The single word echoed in Eric’s mind, but then, as the last glowing embers fell from the sky, silence finally fell over him, too.

The voices vanished.

Then, very slowly, the sounds of reality returned.

All around him, Eric heard people howling and screaming, but this time it wasn’t because of the fireworks from above.

Now it was because of the horror they were discovering all around them.

But inside, all was still quiet.

No more voices shouted in his head.

He looked down at his hands, still clinging to the bloody axe.

His legs began to tremble.

He took one stumbling step toward Tad and Kent, but his legs wouldn’t work, and he sank to the ground, every ounce of his strength drained away, every scrap of energy gone.

He barely felt the quilt his mother wrapped around his shoulders, barely noticed as someone took the axe from his hands.

“It’s okay,” he heard someone say as he took a ragged breath and struggled against the terrible exhaustion that held him in its grip. “You did the right thing. He would’ve killed us all.”

The night began to close around him, and for a moment Eric continued to struggle against the gathering darkness, but then he gave in and let himself fall into the embrace of sleep.

Tonight, no bad dreams would come.