In the Dark of the Night

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!”