Desdemona craned her head and peered over her shoulder, through the open crypt door and up the path toward the lawn.

What she saw hollowed her, clawed out all the elements that kept her intact.

Father was tearing across the rear yard, racing down the slope toward the dock. He was dressed only in a pair of pyjama bottoms, which were saturated with crimson. His uncovered chest and arms were greasy with flowing blood. His face was bearded with a smear of that morning’s shaving foam.

Desdemona cried out to him, but a fresh sight lodged her voice in her throat.

That sight was Mother. She too was racing across the lawn. But unlike Father, her journey was horridly graceful. She moved with all the speed and beauty of a shooting star. Still dressed in her billowing nightgown of soft whiteness, Mother glided after her husband.

Desdemona then noticed that Mother’s feet were not touching the ground. She was like a puppeteer’s prop, animated by a hidden network of pulleys and cords. Her head wobbled as though it was too heavy for her frame.

Mother held a pair of great knives in her fists. The one in her left hand (which was nearest to Desdemona and thus most plain to her shock-widened eyes) was narrow and dripping. The other, which Mother had raised above her bobbling head, was wide and chunky, nearer to a cleaver than a dagger.

On instinct, Desdemona snatched up Celeste and pressed the child’s face into her shoulder. “Don’t look,” she muttered frantically into her sister’s ear. “It’s okay, shh, shhh. Just close your eyes.”

But Desdemona was unable to follow her own instructions. She could but stare helplessly as Mother pounced upon Father and drove the blades into his prone body over and over again; chopping and plunging and slashing with impossible speed and savagery long after Father’s screams had ceased.

Something in the damp, faint song of steel parting flesh managed to alter time, to slow it down to the protracted, inescapable torture of a nightmare. Desdemona couldn’t guess as to how long she stood holding Celeste, listening to those noises that seemed to silence the wind. She stared in a petit mal trance at the rippling leaves of the great mountain ash that stood as a sentinel outside hers and Celeste’s bedroom. She remained transfixed on the sight until a sudden movement in her periphery forced her to look headlong at the sight of Mother, terrible Mother.

She was coming towards them now, skating on the hot morning air. Mother of Swords, her weapons still dripping from the fresh kill, advanced.