Daemon of the Dark Wood (25 page)

“Get your hands off me, faggot!” Wilcox all at once shouted.

“I just wanna touch it,” said Billy Barker, his voice slurred and thick.

“Goddamn queer!” Harvey Cox said with great vehemence. He balled his fists.

Rourke turned to the squabbling men and said, “Hey! Knock it off. Get a grip.”

Arvin Sheets already had a grip: he’d unzipped his pants to unlimber his phallus, a look of ecstasy on his face.

“What the fuck?” someone said in obvious disgust.

Knott tightened his fingers on the shotgun. Tension—sexual and otherwise—charged the atmosphere. An explosion of violent lust seemed imminent. Knott feared it as much as he wanted to see it, feel it, taste it. He thought he should try to intervene, but nothing in his psychiatric experience had prepared him for emergency group therapy in the field with armed men driven to the brink of sexual frenzy. Still, he felt he should try.

But Rourke beat him to the punch. He drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. “I said
knock it off
. I’m Acting Sheriff, and if any of you sons o’ bitches want to test my authority, step up and I’ll shoot you where you stand, by God.”

“Easy, Rob,” Knott said under his breath. As much as he admired the way Rourke was handling himself, he feared that the deputy was perilously close to abusing his vested authority in a lethal way.

If Rourke heard him, he gave no sign. He said, “Put your goddamn dick back in your pants, Arvin. Or I’ll blow it off.”

“I bet you could too,” Wilcox said with an ugly smirk. “I bet you could blow him off real good, you cocksucker. You ain’t the fucking sheriff.”

Knott stepped between the two men. “Time out,” he said, keeping the shotgun angled at the ground so no one would misinterpret his intentions. “We can’t let things get out of control here. Everybody take a deep breath and just step back from the edge, okay? We are not the enemy. That screaming thing up there is, and it’s doing this to us. Fight
it
, not each other.”

“Fucking headshrinker, go back to your loonies,” said Wilcox. “You don’t belong here, you pussy motherfucker. Unless you wanna bend over and take it up the ass.”

Rourke shoved Knott out of the way, stepped forward and hammered his pistol against Wilcox’s head. The big man went down in an ungainly heap, his bulked-up muscles no defense against cold, hard steel.

Rourke turned to the others and said, “Here’s what you’re gonna do.

One at a time, march down the mountain, get in your vehicle and go home. As of now, this search party is disbanded. You go first, Arvin. Now. Move!”

Arvin zipped his fly and started down. He glanced back with a look of embarrassed confusion.

“Billy, you go next,” Rourke ordered. Billy complied, fingering his penis through his jeans as he went.

One by one, under Rourke’s watchful eyes, the men headed back to the road. Knott was spellbound by Rourke’s manliness and his assured command of the situation. He caught himself imagining Rourke joining him and Susan in bed; pictured Rourke’s naked body between Susan’s thighs; saw him pumping her with abandon, his muscular buttocks beautifully taut; saw Susan at last unmasked, her face stark with naked lust. The mental picture made his pulse race and his penis throb. He tried to banish it from his mind.

“Okay, Doc. Your turn.”

“What about him?” Knott pointed down at the unconscious Wilcox, hoping to distract attention he feared his erection would draw.

“Fuck ’im. He’s not going anywhere for awhile. I’ll pick him up on my way down, if he’s still here.”

“You’re going up there by yourself?”

“Yeah. This looks like a one-man job after all.”

“I’m going with you. I’m all right.”

Rourke stared hard into Knott’s eyes, and then said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

“What makes you think you’re the only one strong enough to resist this … spell? Besides, you don’t know what’s up there. What if it sets more dogs on you? You need another gun. And maybe we can help each other fight the effects of this stinking scent.”

“Or maybe it goes the other way and we end up shooting each other.”

“Life’s a crap-shoot,” said Knott, attempting a smile. “You can’t win if you don’t roll the dice.”

“All right, high-roller. Let’s go then. But if you start acting hinky, I’ll put you down.”

“I know. And I’ll do the same for you.”

Rourke smiled and holstered his pistol. “You’re all right, Doc.” He offered his hand.

Knott accepted it. Until that moment, Knott never knew a handshake could be so sensual.

Thorn’s stomach groused at him because he’d neglected to feed it breakfast, but he disregarded the gastric rumblings as he drove up the winding road to Widow’s Ridge; he was far too eager to get to Mrs. Leatherwood’s house than worry about the nuisance of an empty stomach.

She was going to tell him
where the bodies were buried
. If she was true to her word, he could have the physical evidence he needed to proceed with his anthropological explication of native myth versus native history, and he would finally have something substantial to boost his flagging career, and more importantly, to relieve his middle-age ennui. He knew this was his chance to make a significant mark in his chosen field.

He hoped to God the old lady hadn’t been speaking metaphorically about buried bodies. Something in the way she’d said it—her matter-of-fact tone, perhaps—told him she’d meant it literally. If so, then Thorn would finally “make his bones.”

He chuckled at his pun.

“Bones make the man,” he quipped for his own amusement, nearly giddy with excitement.

Of course, even if he found the burial grounds, there was a good chance that the bones would’ve long ago become dust. Much depended on the acidic content of the ground and on the mineralization and remineralization of the bone tissue. If luck was with him, at least some of the bones would now be fossils. If he was
extremely
lucky, some of the fossils would bear the marks indicative of a violent end. Even so, any forensic evidence would be circumstantial, at best, and Thorn would have to rely on Widow Leatherwood’s oral history to lend credence to his thesis.

As he turned on the wipers to clear fog from the windshield, a deer dashed into the road directly ahead of his convertible, and he reacted by slamming his foot on the brakes and wrenching the wheel hard to the right. He knew his little sports car would not fare well in a collision with a full-grown deer, and his determination to avoid a devastating impact led him to cut the wheel too sharply, and the TR6 headed toward the ditch on the right. He compensated quickly and cut back to the left. The car fishtailed and then rode the grassy shoulder of the road, the right wheels skimming the rim of the red-clay ditch as he braked and finally rolled safely to a stop.

He glanced to his left to see the graceful whitetail bounding into the woods on the left side of the blacktop. He blew a whistling sigh through his teeth, relieved that he wasn’t nose-down in the ditch. But his relief wasn’t absolute; from some dark place inside him came the notion that the deer had deliberately tried to stop him. Such suspicion was ridiculous, of course. Though Sharyn wouldn’t think so. Sharyn and her over-imaginative ideas about the pagan god of the woodlands …

Thorn gazed into the woods on his right. His skin prickled up and down his arms. He sensed someone watching him from within the foggy gloom of greenery. Someone or some
thing
.

He floored the gas pedal, pulled back onto the road and sped away. He glanced uneasily in the rearview mirror to make certain nothing was coming after him.

* * * *

Sharyn took her breakfast in her room rather than in the hospital cafeteria. Though the nurse had strongly encouraged her to join the small group of patients trustworthy and well enough to dine in the cafeteria, she’d begged off, claiming a headache she didn’t really have. She simply wasn’t ready to venture outside the relatively safe haven of hospital walls.

She ate all she could stomach of the eggs and greasy bacon strips, then chased it with black decaf. Then she dressed in jeans and an oversized blue T-shirt and ventured down the hall to check on the condition of Dr. Knott’s wife. She wanted desperately to talk to the woman and compare notes, so to speak. She also felt a responsibility to let Mrs. Knott know that she wasn’t crazy—that there truly
was
something out there with the power to fog women’s minds with panic, or lust, or even the urge to commit violence.

When she’d glanced in the doorway last night and seen Susan Knott strapped to the bed in leather restraints, Sharyn had thought:
There but for the grace of a genetic biochemical flaw go I.
She was more convinced than ever that her bipolar disorder (and maybe her lithium) had saved her from becoming a female berserker in response to the pagan call to madness. The question now was whether intense fear and panic were preferable to the alternative. She couldn’t deny that a darker part of her
wanted
to give in to the godlike entity’s call to brutal bacchanalia. Were she to surrender to the manic phase of her disease, stop taking her meds, and let it take her to the extremity of its polarity (as she’d been so many times tempted to do), the likelihood was that she would likewise end up strapped to a hospital bed,
in extremis.
There were, of course, worse and more dangerous places to end up, and there was never a shortage of low souls wickedly lascivious enough to take you to those depths of depravity and degradation. Sharyn had come very close to that end before her first hospitalization and subsequent diagnosis; had in fact narrowly escaped a gang-bang. The forbidden territory of her psyche was always well within reach, ever tempting her to breach its ephemeral gates, follow skewed inner pathways into the outer world and partake of prohibited delights and sweet terrors of the flesh—to wallow in her inherent wantonness. That such indulgence might be fatal only served to sweeten the sexual pot and raise the spiritual stakes. Sharyn always had the easy option of damning herself, and this certainty shaped her life and gave it layers of dangerous ambiguity to which “normal” people apparently had little access. She was blessed with that curse.

As she came to the doorway of Susan Knott’s room, Sharyn’s heart-rate accelerated. Her short walk down the corridor had taken an inordinate length of time. She felt as if she’d been walking for hours; her legs trembled with fatigue and she was short of breath. Had she blanked out? Succumbed to a petite fugue state? She wasn’t sure. What she
was
sure of was that she was at the threshold of a fresh panic attack. She feared confrontation with the woman, and she also feared the no-longer-latent wildness within herself. Though she had no concrete reason for thinking so, she nevertheless thought—feared—that being in the company of the woman on the other side of the door might be extremely dangerous, that she and Susan Knott might fuel one another’s ferocity and both go spiraling out of control. But she knew she had to risk it; if it meant drifting into the orbit of the woman’s madness, so be it. She raised her fist and rapped her knuckles on the door. Without waiting for a response, she turned the doorknob and entered the room.

The woman was sitting on the side of the bed, gazing out the second-storey window. Her back to the room’s doorway, she didn’t bother to turn around to see who’d come into the room.

“Excuse me,” said Sharyn, doing her best to suppress the tremor in her voice.

“I know you,” said Susan Knott. The hospital gown hung open below her shoulder blades, the two lower ties undone. Her skin was creamy white and blemish-free. Sharyn moved forward, suddenly seized by the urge to touch the other woman’s smooth flesh.

“You do?” said Sharyn, crossing her arms below her breasts to keep from touching the woman’s inviting skin.

“You’re my sister,” said Susan. Her voice was throaty and somehow terribly seductive.

“No, I’m Sharyn Rampling. Your husband’s my doctor, for the time being.”

“You think I don’t know my own sister?” She laughed, as if privy to a secret joke.

“If you’d turn around and look at me,” said Sharyn, “then you’d see I’m not …”

Then it struck Sharyn that the woman didn’t mean she was her biological sibling. “Yes, in an odd way I guess we are. We’re both here for the same reason, aren’t we?”

“Did you see him?” Susan Knott half-turned, putting her left hand on the bed behind her and leaning some of her weight on it as she looked up. Sharyn was pretty sure she’d seen that same vampish gesture in an old black-&-white Hollywood melodrama.

Their eyes met. Each read recognition in the other’s eyes. The wildness within Sharyn leapt forward to show itself in her face, taking her breath away in the process. She gasped when she tried to speak. Clutched a hand to her bosom, and tried again. “No,” she managed to say, “I didn’t see him. I think I wanted to when it called but … I was afraid.”

Susan nodded. Her lips formed a half-smile. “I can smell him. He’s close now. Coming closer. We don’t have long to wait.”

“What is he?” Sharyn asked. She took a step closer and rested her thighs against the side of the elevated bed. “Do you know?”

Susan Knott’s tongue flicked out to moisten her lips. Her eyes brightened by an inner fire. “God,” she said.

“God,” Sharyn echoed.

“A
real
god, not the one in Sunday-school fairy tales. God with a righteous cock.”

Now Sharyn smelled it too: the musk of a rutting beast. Though Susan Knott hadn’t got close enough to see her god, she nevertheless carried its indelible scent on her person. And a maddening scent it was! Sharyn flushed with insidious heat. Her flesh prickled with sudden, unbearable desire. Her nipples stiffened against the cotton of her bra. She squeezed her thighs together, the friction bringing a warm surge of wetness down there. Her breath caught in her throat. “That’s … an odd thing to say,” she said, her voice gone husky. But was it, really?

“He’s coming. They can’t keep us from him by hiding us away in the crazy house. He’s coming for our flesh and nothing can stop him. And when he comes inside us, we’ll wear his flesh.”