John Saul - In the Dark of the Night

“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 even 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.”