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.
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.