In the Dark of the Night

by John Saul

  This time he was not going to fail!

  Shivering with anticipation, Logan opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

  RUSTY RUSTON WAS on his third circuit around the expansive lawn that sloped gently down to the pavilion beneath which Ellis Langstrom’s body had been discovered only a few nights earlier. This evening, though, it was almost as if the tragedy had never happened. The pavilion itself was twinkling with thousands of tiny lights as dusk settled, and fireflies were starting to blink as well. A four piece band—the latest in a series of musical performances that had been going on all afternoon—was playing to a nearly full dance floor that was getting more crowded by the minute. The lawn itself had been transformed into a colorful patchwork of blankets as families from all over the county had settled in to eat the picnic supper provided by the Lions Club, then watch the best fireworks display north of Chicago, at least if you believed what Mayor Richmond had to say.

  Under a huge oak tree near the edge of the lawn farthest from the pavilion, Derek Anders was throwing a ball to his toddler son, having apparently decided he’d had enough of the long day of constant surveillance. Two other deputies had obviously taken their lead from Anders, and were waiting for the fireworks with their families.

  At least one of them looked as if he’d had one beer too many, but Rusty couldn’t blame him; all of them had been on duty since early in the morning, and it was long past time for everybody to take a break, including himself.

  Besides which, everything had gone off without a single hitch so far, and this was shaping up as the best Fourth ever, at least for the merchants in town.

  “Here, Rusty, I made you a plate.”

  Ruston turned to see Rita Henderson holding an oversize Chinet platter piled high with barbecued ribs, potato salad, corn on the cob, and even one of Billie-Jo Jensen’s huge biscuits, dripping with butter. His stomach rumbled loudly as he took it, making Rita raise an eyebrow.

  “What a charming way of telling me you haven’t eaten all day,” she said, then eyed the crowd appreciatively. “But what a great day. It all came off perfectly, thanks in no small part to you. You may rest assured that you have my vote next time you’re up for reelection.” She handed him a plastic fork and a napkin. “But right now it’s time for a little relaxation.”

  Ruston smiled, and tried to force his eyes to stop wandering over the crowd searching for trouble that wasn’t there. “Thanks, Rita,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” But just as he headed for an empty seat at a picnic table, he spotted Eric Brewster and Cherie Stevens holding hands as they moved carefully through the maze of blankets, heading for the lemonade booth.

  Which wasn’t a problem in and of itself, but Ruston’s antennae still went up.

  Quickly, he searched the area for two potential sources of trouble: Adam Mosler and Al Stevens.

  Eric’s rival, and Cherie’s overly protective father.

  Ruston spotted Stevens first; Al and his brother Billy were busy on the floating platform, putting the finishing touches on the fireworks display.

  Deciding Stevens wasn’t going to be a problem—at least right now—Ruston searched for Adam Mosler and found him leaning against a tree, glaring furiously at Eric and Cherie.

  Ruston focused his gaze on Mosler, and as if by the sheer force of his will, the boy turned a few seconds later and looked at him.

  They made eye contact, and even from twenty yards away, Ruston could see Adam start to deflate. Finally, the boy nodded, turned, and walked in the opposite direction toward the baseball diamond, where a game of softball was just winding down in the face of the dwindling daylight.

  Good. He could enjoy his meal in peace.

  He settled in at a picnic table with Rita Henderson and a couple of families with little children who moved over to make room for them both. All around him he heard the chatter of happy people. So far, the biggest problems had been a couple of sunburns and one skinned knee, only the last of which had even needed the ministrations of the first aid tent. So if Al Stevens could manage not to blow his fingers off tonight, this whole Fourth of July might just go down in history as the best yet, despite what had happened Friday night.

  Real life could wait until morning.

  He tore a bite of meat off a rib, then sucked the thick sauce off his fingers. “Now that is what I call good,” he sighed.

  On the other side of the table, a baby—probably just a year old and still in its mother’s arms—seemed to sense his mood. Gurgling and smiling, it stretched out its hand toward Ruston, offering him the remains of a potato chip that was clutched in its tiny fingers.

  “Why, thank you,” Rusty said, reaching out to take the chip from the baby. “Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind at all.”

  The baby giggled happily, and Ruston decided that, at least for now, all was, indeed, right with the world.

  RILEY LOGAN STUMBLED out of the carriage house door into the gathering dark of the evening.

  At the top of the lawn, the house was still quiet, still deserted.

  But inside Logan’s head, the voices still whispered. Now, though, one of them had risen above the others.

  A woman’s voice.

  A woman who was speaking to him, telling him what he must do.

  “Not here,” she said. “I want to go where there are people.”

  Logan’s grip tightened on the axe.

  “I need to finish,” the voice whispered. “I need to finish it all.”

  Logan moved toward the path through the woods that would take him to town.

  In the distance, somewhere beyond the treetops, he could see a glow in the sky.

  Lights.

  Lots of lights.

  All the people would be there.

  As many as she wanted.

  “Yes,” the woman sighed as he began moving toward the lights. “Oh, yes.”

  ERIC BREWSTER WISHED he could sink into the pleasure of having Cherie Stevens next to him on the quilt his mother had brought from Pinecrest, and where they now sat with his family. He’d felt a pang of jealousy a couple of hours ago when he first spotted her talking with Adam Mosler, as well as a terrible feeling of disappointment that she was still hanging around with him. In fact, he’d felt a lot more jealousy, and a lot more disappointment, than he’d either expected or been willing to admit to Tad and Kent when they saw how he was looking at Cherie and started teasing him about it.

  And he’d been even more surprised by how good he felt when she’d spotted him, cut her conversation with Mosler short, and come over to say hi, then stayed with him all afternoon, even as Adam Mosler started burning with visible anger. Indeed, he felt good enough about it that he didn’t even mind the leers Tad and Kent were giving him from the blankets they and their parents had spread next to the Brewsters’ quilt.

  But even Cherie’s presence couldn’t quite dispel the dark sense of foreboding that had hung over him all day, the strange feeling that there was something he was supposed to have done that he had failed to do.

  Or—possibly even worse—done something he shouldn’t have.

  The problem was, he couldn’t quite remember what he and Tad and Kent had done the last time they’d gone into the room that was hidden behind the storeroom in the carriage house.

  He remembered clearly what they’d intended to do—that was easy. They were going to go into the room, take apart everything they’d put together, and be done with it.

  But he couldn’t remember taking anything apart.

  Not the lamp, or the hacksaw.

  Not even the scalpels from the medical bag.

  But so what? It wasn’t like anything that had happened was their fault! Certainly he hadn’t killed Tippy, and Tad hadn’t killed Ellis Langstrom, and Kent hadn’t made a lamp shade out of the skin from Ellis’s arm!

  All that happened was that they’d dreamed about those things.

  But how could they have dreamed things they didn’t even know had happened?

  And that, he k
new, was what had been wrong all day: he had a strange feeling that something else was going to happen, something that he and Tad and Kent could have prevented if only they’d done what they went into the hidden room to do. But had they done it? Had they done anything at all?

  Or, even worse, had they done the wrong thing?

  That was the thought that had been hanging over him all day, and now, as the dark of the night gathered around him, that thought was getting heavier and heavier.

  “Hey,” Cherie said, breaking into his reverie. “I know a great place to watch the fireworks from. You know the footbridge over the marsh? The one that leads to the path to The Pines?”

  Eric nodded, and as he saw the sparkle in her eyes, his mood lifted slightly. Maybe, if they were alone in the dark…His spirits lifted even more as he considered the possibilities. “I know the bridge,” he said.

  “My dad helps put on the fireworks, and they always put the platform off the bridge, so it’s the best place to watch from. Want to go?”

  Once again Eric nodded, but out of the corner of his eye he could see his mother already shaking her head.

  “But we should all be together,” Merrill began. “I don’t want to lose—”

  “It’ll be okay,” Dan cut in, cutting off Merrill’s worries even before she’d finished voicing them. Then, certain her real fear was that Adam and his friends might gang up on Eric if they spotted him alone with Cherie, he said to Eric, “Why don’t you take Kent and Tad, too? With all four of you kids gone, there might be enough space on the blankets for the rest of us to actually stretch out.”

  Eric looked at Cherie, who hesitated only a second before nodding, which was just enough to tell him she’d been hoping to be alone with him as much as he was hoping to be alone with her. Still, Tad and Kent would give them plenty of space, and at least nobody had suggested that they take Marci along, too. “Just make sure you come back here right after the fireworks are over,” his father went on as he and Cherie stood up.

  “No problem,” Eric said as Kent and Tad got up, too. A moment later Cherie’s warm hand was holding his own as she led them all across the sea of people and blankets toward the path that would take them to the footbridge.

  RILEY LOGAN MOVED silently along the path toward town, hearing nothing but the voices that seemed to come not only from within his own mind, but from all around him as well.

  The woman’s voice was the clearest, rising above all the others.

  “They never understood,” she was saying. “They never knew why I did it. They didn’t care. It didn’t matter about me. All that mattered was Father. Father and Mother. But they didn’t care about me, either. Nobody ever cared about me.”

  Logan didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself, but it didn’t matter.

  She was talking, and he had to listen.

  Had to listen, and had to obey.

  She fell silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, the tone of her voice had changed. She said a single word: “Stop!”

  Then all the others fell silent, and Logan froze in his tracks and for a moment heard nothing at all.

  Then a different sound came to his ears.

  A sound from directly ahead.

  Someone on the path.

  A man.

  A man who was singing tunelessly to himself.

  Logan crouched low to the ground, hunkered down in the brush at the side of the path.

  He smelled the man before he came into sight.

  “Drunk!” the woman whispered. “Just like Father!”

  The man came into view, his stumbling gait telling Logan the woman had been right.

  “Stand up to him!” the woman commanded. “Stand up and face him!”

  Logan listened and obeyed.

  He rose to his feet and stepped into the middle of the path just as the man approached.

  Startled, the man dropped the bottle of beer he held in his hand.

  “Kill him!”

  Needing nothing more than the softly spoken order to spur him into action, Logan swung the axe.

  Its edge—honed razor sharp by Logan himself only a little while ago—sliced cleanly through the man’s neck.

  His head fell to the ground, the eyelids twitching, the mouth gaping open in surprise and shock.

  Then the corpse’s knees buckled and it sank to the ground, blood spraying the trees, the path, even Logan himself.

  Logan gazed down at the body, not quite certain what had just happened.

  “Yes,” the woman whispered. “Very good. Perfect. That’s one. But there are more. So very many more…”

  “One,” Logan repeated, and now the entire chorus of voices came back and rose, washing over him and bathing him in ecstasy.

  His hands tightening on the axe, he moved forward a few steps, guided by the voice of the woman.

  Then he heard more voices approaching, young voices, and the hollow sound of footsteps on wood.

  People were on the bridge!

  Logan ducked into the woods and slipped down the bank to the dark, cold water of the marsh.

  Quietly, he waded through the tangled reeds until he was directly beneath the bridge.

  He stood silently, listening for the woman’s voice, waiting for her to tell him what to do about the feet that were now scuffling on the wooden planks above his head.

  KENT AND TAD sat perched on the bridge railing, facing the fireworks platform, while Eric leaned back against it with Cherie leaning on his chest. His arms were around her, his nose buried in her hair, taking in her fragrance with every breath.

  Then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice: “Not them. Not here. Not yet.”

  Eric turned to look at Kent, his brow furrowing. “Did you hear something?” The look on Kent’s face told him the answer to his question even before the other boy spoke.

  But it was Tad who said, “A voice,” and slipped off the railing to stand next to Eric. “A woman’s voice.”

  Now Kent, too, was off the railing and peering away into the darkness.

  “I didn’t hear anything at all,” Cherie said.

  “Hurry! I want to do it! I want to do it now!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tad whispered. “Where’s it coming from?”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Cherie demanded.

  The three boys only looked at one another, a terrible dread falling over them as the voices—the voices they’d never before heard outside of the secret room in the carriage house—grew louder.

  Louder, and more demanding.

  LOGAN SLIPPED THROUGH the water as silently as he had moved through the woods, and only when the bridge was well behind him did he finally climb the bank to stand at the edge of the lawn.

  The lighted pavilion—and a thousand people—lay before him like a scene from a dream.

  “Yes,” the woman whispered. “There they are. All the fathers and all the mothers! It’s time. It’s time to make them pay for not caring about me!”

  Logan’s grip once more tightened on the axe.

  With Lizzie Borden’s spirit guiding him, he would, indeed, make them pay.

  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.