Daemon of the Dark Wood (17 page)

Save for the sound of rainwater dripping from the trees, the woods were unnaturally quiet. The moon broke through the clouds and lent a pearly sheen to the short-furred flesh of the Beast’s hindquarters. Two hornlike protuberances growing out of its wide forehead made Asa wonder if this thing before him now was Beelzebub himself, ascendant from Hell. But no, that couldn’t be; his mother had specifically told him that the Beast he was to be on the lookout for was
not
the Devil—not a fallen angel. It was an ancient god, one from among the panoply of deities that populated Old World mythology. He
knew
this creature. He’d seen its likeness in library books, though none of the illustrations had captured this thing’s terrifying aspect, nor its ferocious presence.

Asa widened his stance and braced himself for battle. He tightened his grip on his hunting knife’s haft. As much to confound the Beast as to calm his vaulting anxiety, Asa bellowed more of Blake’s words: “‘For he stove in battles dire, in unseen conflictions with shapes bred from his forsaken wilderness of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element, combustion, blast, vapor and cloud.’” The words strengthened him.

The Beast pierced him with a gaze of cold fury, as if Asa’s belligerent tone had enraged it. It came forward on those curiously bent legs, moving with unnerving animalistic grace.

Asa extended his arm and jabbed the air with his knife. “Come on, you stinking pig! You’ll not touch these ladies! I am the sentinel to these hills. I’ll gut you like a—”

His words broke off midstream when two new women appeared, wraithlike, in the fog, one on either side of the Beast. The fiend had abducted two more to add to his captive harem. One young, the other middle-aged. Both sturdy specimens. Both shockingly naked.

The Beast opened its wide mouth, and at first Asa thought the thing was actually going to grin at him, but then the lower jaw elongated, the dark maw widened, and the Beast issued a strident cry that put the hairs up on the back of Asa’s neck and unleashed a dribble of urine in his britches.

The powerful ululation saturated the night air, sonic waves solidifying into shimmering images called forth from the realm of ancient gods. Asa saw them hanging in the air like pictures on a gallery wall, frozen glimpses of a bizarre and timeless place ruled by ruthless gods like this one now standing before him. The cry rose in volume and pitch until blood trickled from Asa’s ears, then it quavered, sharply decreased in pitch, and finally faded to a puling glissando that left Asa frozen in clammy fear.

The two women standing abreast of the Beast went into rhythmically convulsive contortions, as if dancing to maddening music only they could hear. Their faces twitched and contorted as well, their comely features transforming into hideous masks of rage. Then they came prowling forward in the slinky manner of stalking cats. Possessed and prowling.

Asa heard a shuffle of movement behind him and realized that the three ladies he was trying to protect were also making ready to attack him.

The Beast was using the women as chess pieces, frenzied pawns driven to violence by the cunning god’s commanding cry. Asa was doomed from the start; he could not raise a hand against females. It was a cardinal rule ingrained by his strict upbringing. He would let them tear him apart rather than fight back. His only chance was to take down the Beast and hope that would break the malevolent spell woven over these females.

But it was already too late. The women attacked, launching themselves upon him, clawing and biting as they took him to the ground. With unnatural strength, the five females savaged him. He struggled to throw them off without hurting them, but they fought with the relentless ferocity of a pack of starving wolves. In the disorienting mêlée, Asa lost the knife, and one of the women snatched it up and planted the blade in his throat.

His dying scream gurgled in his throat, and he finally saw that it was his weird to sacrifice himself to this band of madwomen.

Knott drove through the fog, holding the Jag’s speed to an impatient crawl for fear of running off the road. Though he knew the road to his home in Goat Head Hollow quite well, he didn’t trust his memory or his instincts to keep him from losing the blacktop in the fog and plunging down the mountainside.

The fog inside his skull was the real problem; it made everything seem unreal, it rendered his perceptions unreliable. As a man whose vocation required a firm and decisive grip on reality, Knott was unaccustomed to feeling so
at sea
, so lost in mental fog as to be unable to navigate or circumvent the dangers he knew were there though he couldn’t yet see them—like the shrieking thing in the fog.

From the moment he’d left Susan strapped to the bed in her assigned hospital room, he felt like an imposter. A fraud. He wasn’t a real doctor, he was a psychiatric quack. His wife had lost her mind and he had no clue as to how to help her find herself. He was going home, abandoning Susan to insanity—or whatever the hell it was. He’d told himself it would do no good to stay the rest of the night with her; the IM medication he’d ordered for her would zonk her out for hours, so she probably wouldn’t know he wasn’t there. Susan was in the capable hands of a competent nursing staff. For now, she was safe.

But that wasn’t the issue. What disturbed him so deeply was the fact that he could find no rational explanation for what had come over her with such a frighteningly rapid onset, and he certainly wasn’t ready to buy into Sharyn Rampling’s wild theory.

But I heard it myself. There was something out there making that god-awful noise that made her crazy. I felt it too. Not to the extent Susan did, but I definitely
felt something
…
unnatural. Supernatural?

And what if it was still there, waiting for him? What if
he
succumbed to the thing’s crazy-making cry next time? What if—

The dark shape darted into the road ahead of him, floating in the fog and flapping shiny bat-like wings. He stomped the brake pedal and cut the steering wheel hard to the right, narrowly evading a skid into the roadside ditch by cutting back to the left. The Jag lurched to a stop. He shifted into reverse and backed up, trying to catch sight of the figure in the rearview mirror.

A woman in a dark slicker, not a bat-creature. She had been flagging him down, not flapping wings.

She slapped her palm against the driver’s-side window. Knott powered down the window.

“Help me,” she said, panting hard.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He saw that she was on the edge of untamed hysteria, that her hair was a mass of wet tangles festooned with leaves and twigs, as if she’d been rolling on the forest floor. Her face was streaked with mud. There was wildness in her eyes.

“We have to help them,” she said, rushing the words. “He’s come back. Please …”

“Get in,” he said. “I’m a doctor.” Realizing how inane that sounded, he added, “I can help you.”

He caught a glimpse of her bare legs below the folds of the poncho as she ran in front of the headlights and circled around to the passenger’s door, and he got the impression that she was naked beneath the muddy slicker, which was much too big for her.

She threw open the door and climbed onto the seat. She slammed the door and locked it.

“I’m Dr. Knott. What’s your name?”

“Judy Lynn Bowen,” Her lower lip poked out in the manner of a pouting infant bewildered by a personal injury it can’t understand.

“What happened, Judy?” He pulled onto the narrow shoulder of the road and shifted into Park. He turned on the hazard flashers.

“Judy Lynn. Nobody calls me just Judy.”

Knott smiled reassuringly. “All right, Judy Lynn. What happened? Who is it we have to help?”

“Those women … he took ’em and did terrible things to us. He’s …”

“He took you too?”

She nodded.

“Who did?” Knott noted the bloody lacerations on her bare legs, the sort of scratches you might get by running through the woods, but she didn’t appear to have any serious physical injuries—none that showed. Her serious wounds were apparently psychological.

“I don’t know
what
he is. Some kind of monster. With horns like the devil. But the devil’s not real, is he? But this thing is. Real. But he’s not … he’s here but not here, you know?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. I’m not following you. Start at the beginning.”

“You don’t understand. We have to get help. The cops. He’s right up there.” She pointed at the wooded mountainside rising steeply on the right side of the road.

Knott glanced out at the lush darkness and his old fear of the dark once again reached out of the past to twist his nerves into an insidious knot. He shook it off.

“Did he rape you?” he asked.

In the green glow of the dash lights, her face suddenly turned demonic, and just for an instant Knott feared that she might attack him in a fit of paranoia. Then her face softened a little, and she said, “Yes. He did, but not, you know, like a regular rapist. It was … worse. Not that I’ve ever been raped. He did things to us, to
me,
that I … I can’t talk about it now.”

What were the odds, he wondered, of a delusional woman flagging down a psychiatrist on an otherwise deserted mountain road? Delusional or in shock, or both. But still … in light of what had happened to Susan … and with the sound of that screaming cry fresh in his mind, Knott wasn’t absolutely sure that Judy Lynn Bowen was delusional. He briefly wondered what Sharyn Rampling would make of this girl’s wild tale.

“I think we have to get out of here,” she said with renewed urgency. “He could be coming after me. I don’t think Old Edgar could fight him off.”

“Who’s Edgar?”

“You know, the one-eyed wanderer. Old Edgar, the crazy hermit. Would you please just get us the fuck out of here?”

“All right.” He pulled onto the blacktop and executed a tight U-turn. He shut off the hazard lights as he accelerated toward Dogwood. “I’m going to take you to the hospital. They will examine you and clean up your cuts. I’ll call the police and have them meet us at the emergency room and you can tell them what happened.”

“No, that’ll be too late! We don’t have time for that. Those women—”

“I’m calling the police right now,” he interrupted, hoping to quell her mounting agitation. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and punched his speed-dial number for the county police. As psychiatrist, he often had dealings with the Sheriff’s Department, calling upon deputies to transport patients hospitalized by court order or to serve commitment papers. When the dispatcher answered, he said, “This is Dr. Trey Knott. I’ve just picked up a young woman on highway twenty-nine, about two miles east of Goat Head Hollow. She says she was abducted and raped, and that her abductor is still on the mountain with—” He moved the cell away from his mouth and asked the girl, “How many women?”

“Three others.”

He nodded, then continued. “With three other women.”

“He had us in a cave,” Judy Lynn said.

“No, she doesn’t need an ambulance. I’m taking her to Dogwood Medical myself. If you can have an officer meet us there, he can talk to her then.”

He folded the phone and dropped it in his shirt pocket.

Judy Lynn said, “I don’t know if the cops can do any good. I mean … what happens if they shoot the thing? He’s like a ghost. Bullets prob’ly go right through him. I shit you not. He’s like nothing in this whole wide world, nothing you’ve ever seen before. Huh.You think I’m a nutbag, right? Or on drugs. Yeah, sure, I know. But I swear to God I’m not. That thing is
real
.”

“I don’t think you’re a nutbag. You’ve had a traumatic experience and—”

“I’m marrying Reverend Jordan’s son, for cripe’s sake. You think he would let his son marry Psycho Girl? No fricking way, Doc.” She folded her arms across her chest. She seemed very small-breasted beneath the voluminous poncho. “I’m supposed to marry him. He may not want me after … this. God.”

She began to cry. She hugged herself as if trying to contain her overflowing emotions. Her shoulders shook. Her tears made streaks on her muddy cheeks that reminded Knott of war paint.

“I’m c-c-cold,” she said, shivering. “C-could you turn on the heater?”

He turned the heater on and angled the vents toward her. She nodded appreciatively and hugged herself tighter, hunching her shoulders and tucking her chin to her chest. When her crying subsided, Knott said, “Did this thing that took you make a screaming sound, sort of like a wild cat?”

She looked at him with surprise-widened eyes, then she narrowed them in suspicion. “How did you know that?”

“I heard it earlier tonight, outside my house.”

She nodded knowingly, jaw firmly set. “That’s how it gets you. Like it hypnotizes you or something, you know? God, I can’t get that sound out of my head. It’s like it’s stuck there, still … doing something to me.” She shivered harder.

Knott’s imagination went to a place he didn’t like. His usual left-brain dominance gave way to intuitive right-brain speculation, and he was off on a magical mystery tour of possibilities—none of which he found reassuring. Some otherworldly creature was abroad in the night, roaming the hills with single-minded intent, issuing his irresistible call to the unsuspecting women who happened to reside within his newfound territory—his sphere of diabolical influence. But to what purpose? Why, to stash the women in a cave and psychically violate them, of course. To commit serial acts of supernatural rape. The formidable entity had the power to turn a gentle woman like Susan into a raging hellion, and he asserted that power by means of an ear-splitting cry. The creature’s call was so compelling that those victims it summoned would try to tear apart anyone who tried to stop them from going to him.

So why didn’t Sharyn Rampling heed the creature’s call and rush to his side?
This was Knott’s left-brain voice trying to interject down-to-earth logic into his internal dialogue. Right-brain, with its peculiar power to see the big picture, the gestalt in the mosaic, had an answer ready:
Because her medication and/or the biochemical/genetic configuration characteristic of her disorder interfered with the process, her neural receptors having been altered by years of taking lithium. Instead of being seized with a compulsion to answer the call, Sharyn withdrew into a fortress of fear.