The Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz

Robert obviously loved Alana, and everyone could see that she adored him; and the children returned the affection their parents lavished upon them.
    On a night in August, a few days before the Kingmans’ twelfth wedding anniversary, Robert secretly ground up two dozen sleeping tablets that a physician had prescribed for Alana’s periodic insomnia, and sprinkled the powder in drink and food that his family shared for a bedtime snack, as well as in various items consumed by the live-in maid, cook, and butler. He neither ate nor drank anything he had contaminated. When his wife, children, and servants were soundly asleep, he went out to the garage and fetched an ax that was used to chop wood for the mansion’s nine fireplaces. He spared the maid, cook, and butler, but no one else. He killed Alana first, then his two young daughters, then his three sons. Every member of the family was dispatched in the same hideously brutal, gory fashion: with two sharp and powerful blows of the ax blade, one vertical and one horizontal, in the form of a cross, either on the back or on the chest, depending on the position in which each was sleeping when attacked. That done, Robert visited his victims a second time and crudely decapitated all of them. He carried their dripping heads downstairs and lined them up on the long mantel above the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a shockingly gruesome tableau: six lifeless, blood-splashed faces observing him as if they were a jury or judges in the court of Hell. With his beloved dead watching him, Robert Kingman wrote a brief note to those who would find him and his maniacal handiwork the following morning: “My father always said that I entered the world in a river of blood, my dying mother’s blood. And now I will shortly leave on another such river.” When he had written that curious good-bye, he loaded a .38-caliber Colt revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, turned toward the death-shocked faces of his family, and blew his brains out.
    As Roy finished the story, Colin grew cold all the way through to his bones. He hugged himself and shivered violently.
    “The cook was the first to wake up,” Roy said. “She found blood all over the hallway and stairs, followed the trail to the drawing room, and saw the heads on the mantel. She ran out of the house, down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs. Went almost a mile before anyone stopped her. They say she nearly lost her mind over it.”
    The night seemed darker than it had been when Roy had begun the story. The moon appeared to be smaller, farther away than it had been earlier.
    On a distant highway a big truck shifted gears and accelerated. It sounded like the cry of a prehistoric animal.
    Colin’s mouth was as dry as ashes. He worked up enough saliva to speak, but his voice was thin. “For God’s sake, why? Why did he kill them?”
    Roy shrugged. “No reason.”
    “There had to be a reason.”
    “If there was, nobody ever figured it out.”
    “Maybe he made some bad investments and lost all of his money.”
    “Nah. He left a fortune.”
    “Maybe his wife was going to leave him.”
    “All of her friends said she was, very happy with her marriage.”
    A dog barking.
    A train whistling.
    Wind whispering in the trees.
    The stealthy movement of unseen things.
    The night was speaking all around him.
    “A brain tumor,” Colin said.
    “A lot of people thought the same thing.”
    “I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet Kingman had a brain tumor, something like that, something that made him act crazy.”
    “At the time it was the most popular theory. But the autopsy didn’t turn up any signs of a brain disease.”
    Colin frowned. “You seem to have filed away every single fact about the case.”
    “I know it almost as well as if it had happened to me.”
    “But how do you know what the autopsy uncovered?”
    “I read about it.”
    “Where?”
    “The library has all the back issues of the Santa Leona News Register on