Daemon of the Dark Wood (11 page)

She unscrewed the metal lid, turned the jar up to her lips and sipped again of the strong spirits. Then she opened the leather-bound book in her lap and began to read another Hawthorne story.

She heard the great man’s words in her mind and they resonated within her breast. Hawthorne’s deathless voice soothed her for a time. Then her eyes grew tired and she shut the book and wiped away a tear with a lacy hankie.

* * * *

With a delicious shudder, Alfred Thorn smoothed the photocopied pages of Reverend Waller’s journal on his desk. His small office was a bubble of security, a cozy cubbyhole on this stormy summer night. He was the only person in the building, according to Sam Bellows, the nightshift campus security guard.

Thorn packed his pipe and fired it up, savoring the taste and aromatic tang of Prince Albert tobacco—the same brand his grandfather had smoked most of his life. There was no smoking on campus, but there was no one here to catch him at it and complain. He read the first line of the entry he hadn’t let Sharyn see, but his mind wouldn’t stay focused on the words. He kept seeing the fear in Sharyn’s eyes and in the worry lines around her eyes’ corners—fear he’d added to by showing her Waller’s handwritten words and bringing up the subject of Pan. Now he wished he hadn’t done it. He should’ve kept the visit light and just let her know he was there for her, but he’d let the excitement of discovery get the better of him and he had foolishly brought her into his search for the secret of Widow’s Ridge.

“The Secret of Widow’s Ridge,” he said aloud, thinking it would make a fine subtitle for the scholarly article he intended to write for
The American Journal of Anthropology,
once he got to the bottom of the folkloric mystery. Then he once again saw Sharyn’s fear-constricted face and he winced. He shouldn’t have indulged in such speculative fantasy in front of her. What the devil had he been thinking? He’d inadvertently provided her with raw material to feed her near-delusional thinking about some demon of the dark wood calling to her. How could he have been so insensitive? He didn’t know much about bipolar disorder, but he knew that when the body chemistry was out of whack, the typical manic-depressive was prone to delusional thinking. He damned well should’ve known better than to contribute to Sharyn’s unreasonable fears.

Thorn knew what the problem was. He was a man of science, but he still had a boy’s love of science-fiction and the fantastic. He had never outgrown his love of the amazing tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft and the like. That same love had led him into the fields of anthropology and archeology in the first place. Moreover, he believed it was important that he maintain a youthful sense of adventure in his work. Scientific pursuits tended toward drudgery, and the scientist had to take inspiration where he found it if he didn’t want to become a drudge himself. Of course, he never let those fantasies creep into his actual work, and until now he’d always been able to keep the two worlds separate, but this current project was somehow different. This time the fantastic
wanted
to intrude upon the rational world—as it had in his searching conversation with Sharyn. He’d done her a terrible disservice. He needed to make amends. He decided he would take her some flowers when he saw her tomorrow and keep the visit carefree and cheery, with no shoptalk and no mention of anything upsetting.

His conscience somewhat assuaged by his future intentions, he reread the entry for June 26, 1866.

The missing women returned to their homes in the dead of night and were not discovered until the next morning. Most were naked, but a few wore blood-stained garments indicative of their participation in the Abominable Slaughter. The women were confused and could not explain their collective absence, nor could they explain the dried blood on their persons, beneath their fingernails and even in the hair of their privates. Nor were they the least concerned about the gore or about their memory lapses. When asked what had happened to the menfolk, not one of them could answer. But neither did they seem unduly concerned with the missing men. When at last they were told of the slaughtered remains found in the forest, they all seemed genuinely surprised, but not a single female seemed shocked. To a woman, they accepted the news of their Butchered men with a singular lack of emotion. The death of a family dog would’ve evoked more of a reaction than these women exhibited.
I talked to a few of them myself. There was a coldness in their eyes that unnerved me terribly. I could not look long into those dead eyes without fearing the Evil lurking behind them.
But the thing that terrified me most was coming face to face with the girl I’d previously seen eating human flesh. I remembered her well enough—her gore-smeared face will haunt me to the end of my days—but she recognized me not at all. Looking into her blank face convinced me that the women truly had no memories of their murderous rampaging.
I confess I was afraid to spend another night upon that ridge. A common burial ceremony was held for the recovered remains of the dead men. I prayed aloud over their graves and silently prayed for the souls of those women responsible for putting them there, and then I departed just before dark. I was more than willing to risk the Dangers of night travel than spend a night near those Possessed women.

Thorn leaned back in his chair and sucked thoughtfully on his pipe, conjuring a bucolic image of Liza Leatherwood. He was convinced the old girl possessed information he needed to further his investigation, but he didn’t know how to get it out of her. She was a stubborn old bird, too sly to be manipulated into letting anything slip out. But Thorn could be stubborn too, especially when he was on the hunt for buried secrets. He decided he would try her once more before writing her off as a dead-end, a lost source. Tomorrow morning he would have a heart-to-heart with the woman, put his cards on the table, tell her what he knew and hope for the best.

Somewhere in these hills was an unmarked mass grave hiding the old butchered bones of the missing men of Widow’s Ridge. If Thorn could find it and set up a dig, he might uncover proof that the mass murder Reverend Waller chronicled in his journal had actually happened.

* * * *

Asa bent down to examine the gutted corpse. The thunderstorm had moved off toward Goat Head Hollow, leaving a cool drizzle and a light fog, but he was mostly dry inside his poncho. That was good because he knew a chain of storms was coming his way. He pulled the penlight flash from his pocket and clicked it on. He played the beam on the belly of the dead dog, a mongrel with a lot of German Shepherd in him. Something had ripped the mutt open from throat to anus and scooped out its innards. There was no sign of the missing entrails.

Asa stood up straight and sniffed the air. The rain had washed away much of the vile scent, but it was still strong enough to make him queasy and lightheaded. The Beast was ranging the hills tonight.

And it was hungry.

Sharyn Rampling went down the dim corridor toward the nurse’s station to ask for her prn sleep medication. It was after eleven but she wasn’t at all sleepy. Remembering Al Thorn’s story about the elderly female patient’s drawing on the wall, Sharyn paused in the doorway of the room housing the only elderly patient on the unit, and looked into the room. The light was off but the light from the hallway partially illuminated the old woman’s room.

Sharyn looked past the sleeping white-haired woman to the wall behind her and the red markings on it. There wasn’t enough light filtering into the room for her to see any kind of recognizable figure in the markings; she was tempted to switch on the light for a quick peek. Her hand was on the switch when a voice startled her, making her jump back out of the doorway. She spun around to see the night nurse, Carrie Sanders.

“Did you lose your room, Miss Rampling?” asked the nurse.

“No. Of course not. I’m not that far gone. I was just trying to see what she drew on her wall.”

Sanders smiled. “Looks like something a three-year-old would do. Bunch of scribblings all it is. You want your prn?”

“Yes, please. I can’t get to sleep.” Sharyn smiled apologetically. Then she followed the nurse to the small med room and waited at the half-door while the attractive black woman unlocked a metal drawer, found her sleep medication and dropped it into a tiny plastic cup.

Sharyn washed the pill down with a swallow of water from a miniature paper cup. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t usually take sleeping pills but Dr. Knott thought they could help. He seems like a good doctor, but …”

“But?”

Sharyn shrugged. “I don’t know if this is something any doctor can help me with.”

“You feel like talking about it while you wait for your sleep med to kick in?”

“Oh, thank you, no. I’ll go on to bed and read until I get sleepy.”

“Okay then. ’Night.”

“Good-night.”

She padded back to her room, the old floorboards in the corridor creaking beneath the worn carpet. Behind the closed door of the room next to hers came the loud snore of a deep sleeper, and Sharyn wondered how the snorer could possibly sleep through that buzz-saw racket. Feeling a tinge of envy, she slipped quietly into her room, settled into bed and opened her book on the life of William Shakespeare. Because not much was known of the Bard’s life, the book was loaded with conjecture and read more like a novel than a biography, but for Sharyn, much of it rang true. It was fascinating stuff, and it soon took her out of her nocturnal preoccupations and fearful concerns and transported her to Elizabethan England. Her eyelids grew heavy and she found herself rereading passages, compulsively determined to reach the end of the paragraph before shutting out the light and yielding to sleep without a fight. She glanced at the travel clock she’d brought from home. It was nearly midnight. Her eyes went back to the text and she resumed where she’d left off, though now her vision was a little blurry.

With a jolt, she opened her eyes and took another look at the clock. Now it was 12:45, and she still hadn’t reached the end of the paragraph and hadn’t even realized that she’d drifted off. She gave up, shut the book and turned off the bedside lamp.

She dreamed. Though she knew she was in the midst of a dream, she was no less terrified by the thing that came out of the red chaos on the old woman’s wall and stepped brazenly into Sharyn’s world. Towering over her, it moved with a jerky motion on oddly jointed legs, its heavy hooves clomping on the floor as it came forward, broad shoulders hunched and head extended as if to crane down for a close look at her with fierce eyes aflame with lust.

I want to wake up now, she said to her dreaming self. I don’t want to see this.

But she couldn’t wake up. All she could do was stand, trembling, in the dream room and subject herself to the creature’s intensely lascivious scrutiny. When she saw the enormous phallus jutting from its lightly furred loins, its bulbous head bobbing above her belly, she screamed herself awake.

* * * *

Rourke chased sleep. Sleep eluded him. The steady drone of rain on the roof should’ve easily lulled him into slumber but it hadn’t. The rain only made him more pessimistic, more certain that Dudley Wallace’s bloodhound wouldn’t be able to pick up Gladys Gladstone’s scent tomorrow morning.

It was after midnight, and he was tired and emotionally drained from his extended workday but his mind simply wasn’t ready to shut down for the night. His thoughts flitted from Sheriff Gladstone to Judy Lynn Bowen and the other missing women, and then darted back to Gladstone’s hard-to-swallow assertion that his wife had beaned him with the iron skillet, only to return yet again to the other women reported as missing. It was dizzying, the way his thoughts darted about like phantom fish in the opaque goldfish bowl of his skull.

When he tried to focus his thoughts, they went on the lam like wanted fugitives, skulking off in directions Rourke didn’t want to follow, but did because he had no choice. And now he was a captive audience of one to the mental replay of the conversation he’d had this evening with Judy Lynn Bowen’s fiancé, Josh Jordan.

The young man hadn’t been able to contain his agitation, getting up from his armchair to pace in front of the hearth, occasionally stopping to look squarely at Deputy Rourke with pleading eyes and no words to adequately express his anguish. “Somebody took her,” he said again. “That has to be it, ’cause she wouldn’t just run off and not tell anybody, like that runaway bride that was all over the news awhile back. Somebody took her.”

Rourke agreed, but he didn’t say so. It was too early in the investigation to be so certain of it, but he was. The urine on Judy Lynn’s car seat was the clincher. Something had scared the piss out of her and then … poof! She was gone. Taken. Spirited away, leaving behind a fiancé well on his way to becoming an emotional cripple.

Rourke’s conversation with Judy Lynn’s parents hadn’t been any easier. Reverend Bowen had tried to be strong, the pillar of faith he was expected to be, but Rourke hadn’t missed the fear in the preacher’s eyes nor the tremor in his hands. Mrs. Bowen had done a better job of hiding her anxieties, denying that anything bad could’ve happened to her sweet daughter and asserting that Judy Lynn would turn up with a good explanation for why she’d disappeared. The Lord would protect her.

But the fact was, nobody Rourke interviewed had any idea what might’ve happened to the young woman.

She was just gone.

And Sheriff Gladstone was out of commission with a cracked skull, leaving Rourke solely responsible for investigating the disappearances. It was a make-or-break situation. If Rourke blew it, his chances of one day getting elected sheriff would be blown as well. He tried not to think about the future political implications; he knew his prime concern should be finding the victims—if
victims
they were—and determining exactly what had happened to them, but he was too tired to exert mental discipline, and his renegade thoughts refused to be apprehended.

He got up and went to the bathroom. Flicked the light on.

Lucy Fur roused herself from the oval rug on the floor at the foot of the bed and padded after him, giving him a questioning whine.