Daemon of the Dark Wood (15 page)

What worried him, of course, was what would happen when Susan reached the screaming thing. Whatever the hell it was, it was calling her out for a reason. A reason he couldn’t begin to fathom because he knew of no creature in nature that could exert a hypnotic influence on human beings. According to folklore, some snakes were said to be able to hypnotize their prey, usually birds, but science said otherwise.

At the far edge of the slanting yellow rectangle of light spilling from the front door and across the front lawn, Susan lost her footing on the wet grass and went down on her hands and knees.

Knott ran toward her, eyes scanning the surrounding darkness for the maker of that eerie sound. Though it most certainly originated out here in the night, he couldn’t get a fix on it. It was almost as if it were coming from high-end surround-sound speakers hanging in the sky, highest-fidelity speakers powered by a monster mega-watt amp.

Whatever and wherever it was, he didn’t see it. He skidded to a stop on the slick grass and clamped a hand on Susan’s shoulder as she was rising to run again.

She yelped, then turned her head and snapped her teeth at his hand, catching a sliver of skin on his little finger and ripping it, making him snatch his hand off her.

Then she was up and running again.

He tore off after her, his long legs making up for his lack of speed, and when he was close enough he leapt forward, wrapped his arms around her torso and rode her to the ground.

She twisted and squirmed in his arms. She screamed, enraged beyond reason. He exerted more pressure, remembering the bear hugs he and his boyhood pals had administered to each other, the hugger doing his best to make the hug-ee pass out.

Her scream became a stuttering wheeze as he forced air out of her lungs. He squeezed harder still. He began to talk to her in low tones, lips close to her ear, hoping his voice might have a soothing effect. “Easy, baby. Easy now. You’re okay. Relax. Relax now. I’ve got you. Don’t fight me, Susan. I love you, I love you, I love you …”

She thrashed her legs and jerked her head from side to side, otherwise immobilized by his crushing hug. After awhile she was still.

My God, have I killed her?

The shrieking of the thing in the darkness grew furiously louder, angrier, and Knott feared that his eardrums would implode, but then it finally relented, trailing off in the distance and dying away in the steady sound of the rainfall.

* * * *

Asa Edgar clawed the ground and tried to hang on to the flaccid skin of the earth around the rim of the black void, but the pull of the sucking hole was too strong and his fingers only raked oozing lines in the mud as he slipped backward into the hellish pit. His long graying hair was charged with static electricity, spiking straight out in all directions, and his skin tingled as each tiny pore opened in involuntary sympathy to the hole that was trying to devour him.

He didn’t know how long he’d been grappling for desperate purchase at the rim of the hole. His sense of time was askew, his mind afire with all-consuming fear. The muscles of his shoulders and arms ached as if he’d been at it for hours, fighting for more than survival, and he now knew he’d finally reached the end of his worldly tether and the limit of his endurance. He had lost the battle.

The slick rim of the hole fell away and he slid backward into subterranean darkness.

A wall of cool stone broke his fall and sent thrumming jolts of pain running up and down his spine. Then the world seemed to right itself and Asa found that he was sitting on the floor of a cave, his back resting against a concave wall. Though it was dark, he could see pale shapes round about him, womanly forms. The cave was rife with the palpable scent of feminine musk. And lurking below that smell was the familiar scent of the Beast.

He slowly raised a hand to flip up the eye patch and uncover the empty left socket. He often did this to improve his night vision. He didn’t understand how it worked—how an eyeless socket could increase his remaining eye’s ability to see in the dark—but somehow it usually did. He figured it had something to do with his Spirit-Tracker sense, in effect a
seventh
sense. It didn’t work every time, but this time it did.

He looked warily at the women sitting still as statues in the cave. They were all naked, all ghoulishly staring straight ahead at nothing he could see, their eyes as dull as snowflake obsidian. Zombified. In the thrall of the Beast?

There. Did that one with the long teats just twitch her face?

Remembering his penlight, Asa reached inside his muddy poncho, snaked fingers into his shirt pocket and dug it out. He clicked it on and shone the thready beam in the face of the woman he thought he’d seen twitch her facial muscles in a sort of grimace.

She did not react to the light. Her face was as blank as her eyes. Her shoulders were slightly slumped, and her reddish hair was a misshapen bundle of snarls. Her pretty face was just beginning to show age in the furrows in her forehead and in little sparrow tracks around the corners of her eyes. Something about her was very familiar to Asa. He was sure he’d seen her before, somewhere.

He played the light in the faces of the other women, one by one. These weren’t statuesque wood nymphs. They were ordinary women who lived nearby. Or had, until the Beast stole them away and brought them here. But to what end?

A young woman with an upturned nose, firm breasts and wheat-colored hair suddenly turned her head toward the light, and her eyes lost some of their blankness. “Help me,” she said in a small voice.

Taken aback, Asa was speechless—as he often was in the company of females. That these women were naked only added to his tongue-tied silence. He worked his mouth but all that came out was a raspy grunt.

“Please,” the woman said. A tear trickled down her dirty cheek. “I wanna go home.”

Then it dawned on him that Earth Mother had brought him here to save these women, to steal them back from the Beast. The Void hadn’t been trying to eat him after all. But how could he get them all out? The three other naked ladies remained spellbound. Could he stand them up, chivvy them out and prod them along like cattle? Perhaps he could, if they could walk in their dazed condition. He would need the help of the one talking to him, the young one with the upturned nose. He knew he had to overcome his shyness and speak to her. He took a deep breath that sent a jagged bolt of pain up his backbone.

“What’s your name?” he asked her, his gruff voice amplified by the cave’s acoustics and chased by ghostly echoes.

For a moment the blank look came back into her eyes and Asa feared he was losing her, but then he understood that she’d turned her gaze inward in search of her name. She was only partly here in this world; much of her mind remained in the netherworld where the other women no doubt were, sent there by a creature powerful enough to strike them dumb with awe and turn them to flesh-and-blood stone.

“Judy,” she said with the childlike innocence of a three-year-old, “Judy Lynn Bowen.”

“I’m Asa. Asa Edgar. Think you can you help me get these other ladies out of here, Miss Judy?”

“I … I don’t know.” She glanced at the others. Her lips trembled and she looked as if she were going to cry. But she didn’t. She looked back at him and slowly nodded her head. “Yes,” she said just above a whisper, sounding more grownup now. “We have to go before he comes back.”

Asa pulled his poncho off over his head and offered it to her. “Put this on,” he said, covering his empty socket with his eye patch, “’Fraid the others will have to go in their birthday suits.”

She glanced down at her nakedness and blushed. She accepted the wet poncho and slipped into its relatively dry interior. “Thanks. Asa.”

He nodded, then stood up stiffly, doing his best to ignore the sharp sparks of pain shooting from the base of his spine down the backs of his legs.

Bracing her slender hand on the cave’s wall, the girl rose shakily to her feet. A look of uncertainty crept into her face as she glanced at Asa. Then her eyes widened with terror and she said, “He’s coming back!”

Asa listened keenly but he heard nothing but the rain falling outside the cave. “How do you know?” he asked.

“I
feel
him. He’s close!” She trembled, biting her lower lip.

Asa took her at her word. He had little doubt that the young woman was somehow still attuned to the creature that had clouded her mind and psychically imprisoned her here with the other stolen women.

“Then we have to be quick,” he said, already moving toward the three women sitting spellbound on the cave’s floor. “Help me get them on their feet.”

With a panic-stricken expression clenching her otherwise attractive face, she bent to a matronly woman with gray hair, slipped her hands under the woman’s arms and firmly raised her to her feet. “We have to go, Miz Gladstone,” she said.

Asa had a wealth of questions he wanted to ask Judy about the Beast, but those would have to wait. Now the only thing that mattered was getting the ladies out of the cave before the monster returned.

Knott followed the ambulance through the diminishing rainfall. He sat hunched over the wheel, leaning forward as if that paltry few extra inches could actually improve visibility through the rain-smeared windshield. The wiper on the driver’s side needed a new blade, and Knott silently cursed himself for being lax in maintaining his Jag.

Procrastination is a symptom of repressed anger
, his psychoanalytic mind nagged.

Fuck off
, he told his inner shrink.

He wasn’t angry. He was scared. Afraid of his wife’s anger, her rage. Most of all, he feared for her wellbeing.

“Come on,” he said, glaring at the ambulance on the road in front of him. “Speed it up, asshole.” Okay, so maybe he
was
angry. So what?

He wanted badly to unleash the horsepower under the Jaguar’s hood and burn up the winding road with speed, though he knew there was no reason to do so. He didn’t need the cold, analytical voice of his inner headshrinker to tell him that the impulse to gun the horses was his pent-up anxiety looking for release. Getting Susan to the hospital ten minutes sooner wouldn’t make a significant difference. She was safely strapped to the stretcher in the back of the ambulance, with an EMT in attendance; she was in no position to harm herself or others.

The white hand-towel wrapped around his left hand was blotchy with blood from the stigmata-like wound in the soft flesh of his palm. Susan, in her rage, had caught his hand in her mouth and bitten a chunk out of him. That was the moment he’d realized he couldn’t handle her at home and called for the ambulance to transport her to Ridgewood after he’d wrapped her in a bed sheet to restrain her. He was past caring how it might look to others when they learned that esteemed psychiatrist Dr. Trey Knott had admitted his own wife to the funny farm.

Can’t even keep his own wife sane
, a faceless voice mocked,
so how’s he going to help his patients? Better set his own house in order before he meddles in our domestic affairs and in our blooming heads.

Screw that, he thought. Susan was in trouble. Helping her was the only thing that mattered now. If his reputation suffered a temporary setback, so be it.

Before the ambulance pulled up in front of his house he’d phoned ahead to alert the nursing staff and give verbal admission orders for Susan. He was thankful when Nurse Sanders answered. She was the best nurse on staff and the one least likely to make him feel uncomfortable (or idiotic) when it came time to explain what had precipitated Susan’s violent episode. Sanders would take it all in, nodding with sympathetic understanding—even though he himself was at a loss to understand just what the hell had happened. Yes, he’d heard the shrill, disembodied shrieking that had presumably set Susan off, and no, he didn’t know what the hell it was, but he saw the effect it had on his wife.

It was the same sound Sharyn Rampling had described, undoubtedly the same shrill screaming that had driven her in a panic to seek admission. But what the hell made that sound? What creature in nature possessed the power to cloud human minds and affect human behavior with its cry? And why hadn’t that eerie cry affected Knott in similar fashion? True, he had felt
something
—something he didn’t exactly know how to put into words—but he hadn’t gone berserk. Hadn’t turned violent. He’d felt fear, but he’d been afraid for Susan, not for himself. Still, that sound had disturbed him deeply, viscerally. And it had momentarily paralyzed him. It disturbed him now just thinking about it. He feared that its echo might be trapped in his skull. How crazy was that?

When the ambulance pulled up in front of the hospital, Knott pulled into a designated “Doctors Only” parking space in front of the paved walkway leading from the main building to the small cafeteria on the right. He was standing impatiently by the ambulance’s rear door before the driver got out. The rain had dwindled to a light drizzle, and the night was unusually cool for this time of the year.

The other EMT opened the rear door from the inside, and Knott saw his wife belted to the stretcher. The blue robe he’d managed to get her into before leaving home hung open at her thighs, revealing her long shapely legs but thankfully it covered her privates, concealing the fact that she wore no underpants. Dressing her in the robe had been hard enough; he hadn’t risked getting kicked by trying to force her into a pair of panties. Just wrestling her into the robe had been a chore, given her surprising strength and ferocity.

As the Paramedics unloaded the stretcher, Knott flipped open his cell phone and called the nurse’s station to tell Nurse Sanders that he was downstairs with his wife. Sanders said they were ready to receive the patient. Then she asked if he still thought the leather restraints were necessary.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said, then pocketed the phone and jogged up the front steps to hold the glass doors open for the stretcher-bearers. As they carried Susan past him, she shot him a look of undiluted hatred and snapped her teeth at him. He tried to say something comforting to her but a shaky catch of breath in the back of his throat held him silent.