Satan's Child / The Darkest Night

The folk of Kinskerchan were averse to Elspet Malcolm's tempting beauty. They gloated as her husband lashed her raw. Then they burned her at the stake--mindless, in their godly work, of the son who added his own screams to his mother's final agonies...Ian Malcolm would leave that Scottish village, to sit at the feet of Himalayan masters and perhaps never to return. Yet something appeared in Kinskerchan--a thing of ghastly, ever-changing shapes--to exact a weird and terrible vengeance, one by one, on the murderers of Elspet Malcolm. It was a beautiful--and evil--woman. It was a raging bull. It was a marauding tiger. But to Pricker Gill, the last to await his fate, it was none of these . . . it was the spawn of the devil straight from Hell!The Darkest Night--the night when the devotees of Kali, goddess of destruction, made their unholy puja. This was the night when Desmond Wood faced the grimmest challenge of his whole life; a test that was to bring him face to face with the unspeakable horrors of a worship based on death and destruction.A young English girl stripped for sacrifice . . . blood-maddened, lust-crazed worshippers . . . and the esoteric mysteries of a faith founded on the ultimate Negation . . .These were the elements that came together on the Darkest Night; Kali's festival of unbridled licence and foulest murder.