Daemon of the Dark Wood (6 page)

“How the hell did you talk your dad into
this
? It looks like a fucking cemetery.”

“It does not. It’s a meditative rock garden. The angels were done by world-famous sculptors. Cornelia, Dickinson, and even Father Brankin, who studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. To name just a few.”

“That must’ve set the old man back a pretty penny. But I have to admit, it does look angelic as hell. Very impressive.”

“You want to get out and look?”

“Nah. I’m not in a meditative mood. Right now all I want is a hot shower and a hot toddy.”

“You’re hopeless,” said Julie, goosing the gas pedal.

“Hey, can I help it if I do my best meditating on the porcelain throne? All those angels make me as nervous as a ho in church.”

“Hopeless,” Julie repeated, pretending to be offended.

Less than an hour later, the van was unloaded and all their things were inside the two-story apartment. Julie laid claim to the bedroom overlooking the quadrangle of angels, and Angela took the room across the hall with a towering view of the mountain’s tree-lined summit. Both bedrooms had adjoining bathrooms, and Angela was warming up from her cold dip with a steaming shower. Julie had just finished setting up her workstation on the desk in her room (she could’ve turned the spare bedroom into a study, but she liked having her workstation close to her bed so she could get up and bang away on her laptop in the middle of the night if she felt like it—as she often did). She turned on the power to make sure everything was in good working order. With a low-pitched hum, the system came online, the screen glowing a dark blue.

“All systems go,” she said to herself. But she knew that wasn’t altogether true. Something was missing. Certain it was more than a silly superstition, Julie had come to think of her angel as her semisecret muse, and now that she no longer felt his benign presence, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to write without Michael at her shoulder, offering silent guidance and inspiration.

“Where are you, Michael?” she whispered. “Why have you deserted me?”

Julie’s angelic guardian had been with her since prom night of her senior year in high school. That night as she was climbing into the backseat of a friend’s Chevy, she felt a feathery touch on the back of her neck and was suddenly and inexplicably overwhelmed with a feeling of impending doom and abject sadness. Her date asked her what was wrong. And then she knew; and she whispered: “Death car.” She got out of the car and tried to talk her friends out of their joyride, but they just scoffed at her and went ahead, leaving Julie and her sullen date on the curb. The four students in the car all died later that night in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer. Julie realized that the feathery touch and the dire warning must have come from a guardian angel. From then on, she tried to keep herself attuned to the otherworldly realm of angels, and she gradually learned to sense the guardian’s presence (it felt something like warm sunlight on a bleak winter’s day). He never actually spoke to her; he communicated by means of angelic radiation, which Julie received as premonition, inspiration or validation. Of course, there had been times in the dozen years since prom night when Julie doubted the existence of guardian angels, and times when she thought she must be delusional for having believed that some divine entity was watching over her, but now she had no more doubts. Michael was real. And for some reason, he had left her alone and unprotected. Had she done something to anger him?

Yawning, she rose from her desk to stretch her kinked-up back and then decided to lie down on the bed for a catnap. She was a little road-weary from the trip from Atlanta and felt the need to recharge her biological batteries. She fluffed the pillow, stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes. The sound of running water from across the hall in Angela’s bathroom was as soothing as the sound of a gentle rain on a tin roof, and Julie swiftly drifted into the seductive netherworld of sleep.

* * * *

She wakes with a start. The computer’s screen gives off an eerie green glow in the darkened room. She eases herself off the bed and sits at the desk. She reads the green letters on the black screen.

HE COMES

She hears the droning patter of Angela’s shower and the hum of water moving through pipes. She gives her head a shake, trying to clear her sleep-fogged mind. “I didn’t write this,” she says. “Who did?”

Another line of green typeface appears on the screen.

MICHAEL

“You gotta be shitting me,” she says in disbelief. Then she shouts: “Angela! How the hell are you doing this?”

She stares at the screen. “Michael?
My
Michael?”

YES

“This is not real. I’m dreaming is what this is.”

DREAM REAL

“Whoa, what the fu—”
All the letters of the next two lines appear simultaneously.

HE CALLS

DONT ANSWER

“I don’t understand,” she says, her heart drumming against her rib cage. “What’re you saying?”

More letters appear onscreen.

ZXXIALIERNVOSLDMKRPZXUY

“Michael? I can’t read that. That’s gibberish. Michael?”

When no new line appears, Julie begins to tremble with dread. Her teeth chatter, though she is not cold. “Michael? Don’t leave me. Please!”

EOKJF;OUASDGVVPEROTU

With tears streaming down her cheeks, Julie places her hands on the screen and whimpers: “Why did you leave me?”

LSBADLKD PLACELAMLZXUFDARKNVNUONEMDCOMEST

The extraneous letters fade away and Julie reads the remaining words.

BAD PLACE DARK ONE COMES

Before she can speak again, the screen goes dark.

An oozing, suffocating darkness envelops her and she is drawn irresistibly into a black chasm …

* * * *

Wrapping a bath towel around her dripping body, Angela lifted her mug from the bathroom counter and drank the last of her hot toddy, then sloshed some bourbon into the mug and drank it straight. She moved languidly to the bedroom window and gazed out at the forested mountainside and at the houses dotting the ridge above her. Hillbilly houses, she thought, inhabited by backwoods in-breeders straight out of
Deliver
ance
. Cow fuckers who tell you to squeal like a pig while they sodomize you. She snickered at her own childish cynicism, then amended the thought: Most of them are probably decent God-fearing people, the same as me—except for the God-fearing part. Though she had been raised in the Methodist church, she had decided early on that if there
was
a God, He would not be the wrathful figure of vengeance the pulpit-pounders liked to portray. No, He would more likely be an It, a cosmic intelligence underpinning everything from the infinitesimal to the infinite. Heaven and Hell were no more than constructs of the frail human mind, and Good and Evil didn’t exist outside of human perceptions. Angela had learned that in Philosophy 101. Funny though, that Julie had taken the same course and come away with a totally different outlook. But then, no amount of philosophy could make Jools give up her guardian angel. Old Mikey was her angelic crutch, her soothing delusion. Angela didn’t begrudge her that. Whatever gets you through the night, like that old John Lennon song said.

As was often the case, the bourbon put Angela in a philosophical state of mind, so she went across the hall to find an audience for her pregnant pontifications. But her would-be audience was curled up on her bed, catching a few afternoon Z’s. “Sweet dreams, Jools,” she whispered, and decided a nap wasn’t such a bad idea. She went back to her room, tossed off the bath towel and lay down naked on her own bed.
Just a short nap, then I’ll explore our new digs.

* * * *

The stone angels wear the pale blush of moonlight and Angela marvels at the way their blank eyes seem to follow her every move as she wanders through the garden of smooth stones. The walls of hedges enclosing the quadrangle are dark and sinister, yet each leaf is a sharply distinct spade-shaped spearhead, stirring imperceptibly in the night air. She doesn’t know what possessed her to come out here—alone in the dark and wearing nothing but a towel—to walk among the spooky statuary of mythical beings, but she knows she has made a mistake in doing so. A terrible mistake. Because she now knows she is not alone. Something is moving with her, stalking her, just out of range of her peripheral vision. She feels its presence, its hunger …

She pauses in front of a winged fairy seated beside a fountain spouting water and she reaches out to touch the nymph’s white-marble flesh. “If I had your wings I’d fly the hell outta here,” she says in a voice not quite her own. She suddenly spins around on the axis of her bare heels, hoping to catch sight of whatever is stalking her.
There! Something moving in the moon shadows.
Something there but not there. A ghost?

Angela hastens along the stone footpath, looking for—but not finding—the way out of this haunted garden. The sound of weeping brings her up short. On its knees and bent over an altar of rosy marble, an angel with half-folded wings is weeping into the crook of its stone arm. “My God, you’re alive!” cries Angela. Then it dawns on her: “You’re
all
alive.”

Wings flutter stiffly, rustling the air. The night sighs with the collective breath of stony sentinels guarding the luminous rocks of mystical geometry. The weeping angel lifts its head. Tears of blood streak the perfect contours of its face. Rivulets of blood flow from the corners of its mouth, and Angela sees the half-eaten corpse of a human infant lying on the altar.

“That’s my baby,” Angela says, for she knows in her heart that the dead infant somehow evolved from the fetus that a doctor sucked from her womb within the grim walls of an Atlanta abortion clinic three years ago.

“No,” says the carnivorous angel, “you gave it to me. She’s mine now.”

Turning to run from the guilty spectacle of gore, Angela encounters a new horror. From its gothic pedestal, an angel with mammoth musculature steps upon the earth and flutters great wings no longer made of stone. The alpha male of angels towers over Angela and looks down at her with a ferocious aspect. She wants to run but her legs feel like they’ve turned to statuary stone. Leering at her, the angel speaks in a voice hewn from granite: “Stone to flesh, flesh to stone.”

Angela screams when she sees the enormous richly-veined phallus rising from his powerful loins. Cold hands throw her to the ground. The fierce angel falls upon her, wrenches her thighs wide and rips her apart with his ungodly phallus.

All she can do is scream. Then she turns to blood-streaked stone.

* * * *

“Jools!”

“Angela!”

They each awoke screaming for the other. They met in the hallway and fell into each other’s arms, seeking refuge from their bad dreams, but their desperate embrace offered little solace. They both sensed that some psychic boundary had been breached, that a dark river of nightmares had reached flood-stage and its clammy terrors were about to overflow the banks of the waking world.

They huddled head-to-head in the dim hallway, simultaneously laughing and crying, their tears a warm drizzle on Angela’s bare breasts.

He was known by many names.

In Goat Head Hollow he was called One-Eyed Jack, owing to the fact that he always wore a patch over his empty eye socket.

In the town of Dogwood he was known as The Rambler, or sometimes the Scrambled Rambler, because rambling was what he did and his brains were said to be scrambled (how else to explain his aimless wanderings over hill and dale?).

The inhabitants of the little hamlet of Widow’s Ridge referred to him variously as The Wandering Hermit, The Monk (because of his solitary and ascetic lifestyle), Old Scout, or simply Old Edgar. Because the log cabin he called home was closest to Widow’s Ridge, some of the more kindly-disposed ridge dwellers thought of him as one of their own, and a few even claimed him as their vagabond mascot.

To the students of Dogwood Community College he was known as Bigfoot, and to many of the younger children of this North Georgia hill country he was called The Bogeyman because he projected a rather frightening, piratical appearance, and because some parents used the specter of the eccentric rambler to scare their youngsters out of venturing into the woods and getting lost. “Stay out of the woods or the Bogeyman”—The Rambler; Old Edgar; Old Scout; The Mad Monk—“will get you,” a parent might warn.

This man of many names had been christened Asa Edgar by his parents as they dipped their newborn boy into cold river currents. To this day Asa retained a vivid memory of that baptism, even though his mother had told him years ago that it wasn’t possible for newborn babies to remember anything. His mother had been mistaken. He
did
remember. But he hadn’t argued the point; his father was a strict disciplinarian and not one to spare the rod, the belt, the switch, or whatever was handy at the time of the boy’s offense, and arguing with a parent was most certainly a violation of the “Honor Thy Mother and Father” Commandment.

As an only child, Asa learned to keep a lot of things to himself. He saw things others in his rural orbit apparently didn’t see, and he learned to keep those things to himself as well, because he didn’t like to be called “Crazy Asa” by the other children in the one-room schoolhouse. Rather than become a social outcast, he became a loner by his own choice, a follower of his own inner lights. While the other kids played their silly games, Asa took to the woods and found contentment in solitude. The creatures of the woodlands were his companions, and the expansive canopy of trees became the boundless cathedral wherein he worshiped Great Earth Mother. With his mind afire with ecstatic visions, he grew into manhood. When his parents died he sold their house in Widow’s Ridge and built himself a log cabin in the deep woods near the top of his ancestral mountain. The Great Mother sustained him. Hunting, trapping and fishing put food on his humble table, and when he needed money for supplies, he did odd jobs for people in Widow’s Ridge or in Dogwood. Once, back in ’89, he worked as tracker for Sheriff Gladstone and helped the law track down an escaped convict who had taken to these hills.