by John Saul
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.
ERIC BREWSTER MADE a right turn off the highway, following the sign for Phantom Lake. Though it had been only five years since he, Kent Newell, and Tad Sparks had been up here, nothing looked the same.
Or at least it didn’t look the way he remembered it.
Last time he’d been up this far north, it had been with his parents and his sister, and they’d been intending to spend the whole summer at the lake.
Instead it had been barely two weeks.
Two weeks that were still, even after five years, etched in his memory as vividly as if they had happened only a week ago.
Except that even though the memories were vivid, he still wasn’t exactly sure what had really happened.
“Just three more miles,” he announced, breaking the silence that had hung in the car for the last hour—an hour during which, Eric was sure, Kent and Tad had been as involved with their memories as he had been with his own. Yet so far none of them had even mentioned the real reason they were here, just as they had maintained a near silence about those two weeks through their last year of high school and the four years of college that had followed.
The same near silence had hung not only over the three boys, but over Eric’s family as well. That Fourth of July had been hardest for Marci. For more than a year she had awakened almost every night with nightmares about a wild-eyed man with a flowing beard coming after her with an axe, waking the whole family with her screams. But eventually the nightmares lost their power, and she hadn’t even mentioned one in the last few months.
His mother, on the other hand, was still trying to overcome the terror those two weeks had instilled in her, and even now refused to leave the shelter of their home in Evanston for even a single night.
Nor would she talk about what had happened, covering her ears if anyone even mentioned Phantom Lake.
But now, as Eric, Kent, and Tad drew closer to the lake, the atmosphere in the car changed. Kent and Tad both sat up and began looking out the windows, putting their memories behind them, at least for a few minutes.
Tad leaned forward between the two front seats. “Remember Cherie?” he asked.
“Of course I remember her,” Eric said, almost too quickly.
“That’s probably why he was so hot to come on this trip,” Kent said, knowing even as he said it that Cherie Stevens had nothing at all to do with them coming up here.
“Did you two stay in touch?” Tad asked.
“She called me a couple of times,” Eric said. “But after that…” His voice trailed off as he searched the landscape for something that looked familiar, but saw nothing.
It had been too brief a time, too long ago.
“She’s probably married to that dweeb and has five kids,” Kent said.
“Adam Mosler,” Eric breathed.
“Yeah,” Tad said. “Adam Mosler. God, what a jerk. Suppose she still works at that ice cream shop? And what do you bet Mosler’s working at the gas station?”
Eric shrugged as he maneuvered the car into the bend that would feed them directly onto Main Street. “We’re about to find out.”
But as they came out of the bend and the village appeared before them, nothing looked any more familiar than it had when they’d gotten off the highway a few minutes ago.
The Phantom Lake they had expected to see had vanished.
Vanished almost without a trace.
The buildings were still there, of course, but they looked nothing like they had five years earlier.
At least half of them were boarded up, and even those that weren’t had a weather-beaten, unkempt look to them. Paint was peeling, exposing graying wood beneath, and what awnings were still in place were sagging, torn, or both.
In spite of the warm summer day, there were no crowds of tourists wandering the streets.
No one wandering the sidewalks with an ice cream cone in one hand and shopping bags in the other.
No blankets on the pavilion lawn.
No picnicking families on vacation.
No children splashing in the water, no one waterskiing.
The marina held only a couple of fishing boats, both of which looked as worn and tired as the village itself; all the other slips were vacant.
A sodden mass of trash lay mounded against the base of the pavilion.
Unconsciously, Eric slowed to the pace of a funeral cortege as they crept along the deserted street.
“There’s the ice cream shop,” Tad said softly, pointing. “Or at least that’s where it was.”
Sheets of plywood now covered the plate glass windows, and the peeling sign hung askew.
In the next block, they spotted another sign on another vanished business, one that had faded eve
n more than that of the ice cream shop, but was still barely legible:
CAROL’S ANTIQUES
“Jesus,” Kent breathed. “What the hell happened to this place?” Yet even as he asked, he was fairly sure he knew the answer.
The same thing that had happened to them had happened to the town. Except the three of them had been able to leave right away.
The rest of the town had not.
“I wonder how long it took?” Tad asked, knowing that all three of them were holding the same thought, just as they had since childhood.
“I don’t know,” Eric replied. “But I know who could tell us. If she’s still here.” A few seconds later he turned into the library parking lot, where only one car sat by itself.
Less than a minute later they pulled the library door open and went inside, their footsteps echoing in the silent building.
The librarian’s nameplate still read MISS EDNA BLOOMFIELD, just as it had five years ago, but no one sat at the desk.
“Hello?” Kent called.
A small voice came out from between massive shelves of books: “I’m here!” Then Miss Bloomfield herself appeared, patting her hair nervously. She was exactly the same as Eric remembered her, but even older and tinier. She hurried toward her desk, rubbing her hands briskly as she sat down. After adjusting the single pencil that sat on the desk, she looked up at the three young men. “Oh, my goodness! We don’t often get patrons anymore. I tend to talk to myself, so I didn’t hear you come in.”
“We were wondering if maybe you could tell us exactly what happened here,” Kent asked. He glanced at Tad and Eric, but when neither of them said anything, he spoke again. “Our families used to come here when we were kids, and now—” He hesitated, but found no better way to say it. “It looks like the town’s been deserted.”
Edna Bloomfield sagged visibly in her chair, and when she replied, she didn’t quite meet their eyes. “It was something that happened about five years ago.” She shook her head sadly, took a deep breath, then went on, but now her voice was barely audible. “Twenty-four people were killed,” she whispered. “And I don’t know how many more were hurt. It was terrible…just terrible.” Finally, she managed to look directly at them. “The town never recovered. First the tourists stopped coming—I mean they just stopped, overnight—and the people started moving away.”
