She’d stripped off her clothes as she wrote; she didn’t pause to analyze her sudden need to be naked. It simply felt right to keep physical encumbrances to a minimum. She was midwife to her own birthing. The sonic seed implanted in her psyche last night had already come to term, and the hour of birth was now at hand.
With The Ravenwood Horror aborted and forgotten, she was free to tell this new tale with a tabla rosa mind. But the slate didn’t stay blank or pristine for long; the words and images spewed forth in sick gouts of blood and black fluids, letters like bird tracks in the pornographic gore.
“Julie, please,” said Angela at the door, “I’m really worried about you now. Why have you locked me out?”
“You’re sweet,” Julie said, her lover’s distraction truly trying her patience now. “But you have to leave me alone now. I’m working.”
“But we were supposed to go into town, remember? For groceries?”
“Goddammit, woman, go away!”
Ange kicked the door again. “You know what? You’re a first-class bitch. You want me to go away? Fine. I’m fucking outta here.”
Julie made a guttural sound in the back of her throat that wasn’t quite a growl. She hammered a fist on the desk, then jumped up and went to the door. She unlocked it and threw it open. “Angela, wait …”
But Angela was no longer there.
“Angela? I’m sorry,” she said to the empty hallway. “I just need a little more time alone. If I don’t get this stuff down now …”
She heard the front door slam. She went to the top of the stairs, and stood there a moment, debating whether she should go after Angela. A few seconds later, she heard the van crank up and drive away, tires screeching.
“Be a bitch, then,” she said.
Then she returned to her writing to resume the scene wherein a slatternly madwoman has sex with a big black dog. She’d never written of such perversity before, certainly not with Michael looking over her shoulder, but that was of no consequence now. She no longer needed a guardian angel.
She’d found something more suited to her purposes. Something dark and primal, mysterious and terribly exciting. A godly thing that was changing her from the inside, out.
* * * *
Rourke was the first to see the dark mouth of the cave, partially hidden behind a twisted thicket of vines. He put his hand on Knott’s shoulder and then pointed at the cave’s entrance. The physical contact with his companion heightened the extraordinary sexual tension he’d been trying to ignore. He snatched his hand off Knott’s shoulder, and then brought his index finger to his lips to urge silence and stealth. Knott nodded. They crept as quietly as they could toward the cave.
Rourke drew his pistol, momentarily relieved by the physical rush of unambiguous masculine power. He unclipped the flashlight from his belt, aimed it at his face and clicked it on to makes sure the batteries were good. They were.
Knott brought the shotgun up to his shoulder as he moved toward the cave. He handled the gun with the aplomb of an experienced hunter.
The sun was a hazy ball of fire above the breaking fog, but the woods seemed somehow darker now, filled with sinister shadows. The scent of sex was stronger this close to the cave, and Rourke reckoned that they were walking into a trap set by the devious creature of unknown origin. He sensed that his law-enforcement experience and tactics would be of little use here. He didn’t want to go into that granite maw of darkness, didn’t want to step into its throat; the horrors within would surely swallow him.
Then he recognized an underlying smell: the coppery odor of fresh blood, mixed with the suffocating smell of raw flesh. He glanced to his right, looked down, and saw blood spatters and scattered pools of blood. Something—or someone—had been recently slaughtered on this ground, but there was no evidence of animal skin or body parts.
He silently prayed that this was only the blood of a large woodland creature.
He froze a few feet from the entrance. Knott glanced his way, eyebrows raised. Rourke steeled himself as best he could, then nodded to Knott and together they went into the cave.
The hairs on his arms stood at attention as he moved into the electromagnetically-charged air. He raised the flashlight in his left hand and braced his pistol-holding right hand on his left wrist to synchronize the aim of gun and flashlight.
“Oh Christ,” said Knott, who was the first to see the abomination on the floor of the cave.
Rourke saw it then and put the beam of light on the two rutting figures. The woman was oblivious to the presence of her disgusted spectators. On her hands and knees, she stared blankly at the cave wall in front of her as a large brown dog went about his business of humping her from behind. The mongrel’s ears were laid back, his teeth bared in a wicked canine grin as he fucked the dazed woman.
“No!” shouted Knott as he stepped toward the dog and raised the shotgun as if to hammer the mutt’s head with it.
“Wait,” Rourke said. “I’ll do it so there’s no chance he can bite her.” He cautiously walked up to the dog and stuck his gun’s muzzle an inch from the side of the dog’s head. The mongrel cut his yellow eyes at Rourke but he was too deep into the throes of bestial lust to pull out of the woman and escape with his life. The dog whined and humped faster, its tail flagged over its furry flanks as if to protect its genitals.
Rourke cocked the hammer, angled his aim so that there was no chance of hitting the woman with the shot, and squeezed the trigger.
The dog’s head flopped to one side and hung limp even as his flanks made two, three final thrusts into the woman, then the mutt convulsed and fell still, draped as limp as an animal skin over human haunches.
“God,” said Knott, his face starkly pale in the dim light.
Rourke shone his beam about the cave to confirm that there were no other occupants. “Where are the others?” he asked.
“He took them,” said Knott. “And the son of a bitch left this poor woman just to taunt us. Do you know her?”
“Sarah Melton,” Rourke said. “A schoolteacher.”
Rourke holstered his gun and then bent down and peeled the dead dog off Sarah Melton’s fleshy rump. She looked back at him and growled, her eyes ablaze with rage. He tossed the reeking dog to the ground and backed away from the furious woman.
Knott intervened, kneeling beside her but taking care to stay out of range of her teeth. He said, “Sarah, it’s all right. We’re here to help you. You’re safe now. I’m Dr. Knott and this is Deputy Rourke. We—”
She made a mewling noise and shifted her weight so that she was offering her “hindquarters” to the doctor. Rourke realized he should’ve brought a blanket to cover her with, but in her present state of mind keeping her covered wouldn’t have been easy anyway.
“No, Sarah,” Knott said, exercising the patience of a man accustomed to dealing with deeply disturbed individuals. “This is not appropriate behavior. I want you to stand up now. Take my hand, Sarah. Take my hand and stand on your own two feet.”
Knott straightened up and extended his hand.
Sarah cut angry eyes at him and snarled, baring her slight overbite.
“I don’t think”—Rourke started, but didn’t finish his thought because the woman suddenly lunged at Knott’s hand, snapping her teeth and just missing his fingers when he snatched his hand away.
Undaunted, Knott spoke again in the calm but firm voice of the therapist: “Sarah, I won’t allow you to bite anybody. You need to get control of yourself right now. You’re a human being. Act like one. You are not a beast of the field. What would your students think if they could see you acting like a wild animal? Now stand up and walk out of here with me.”
The woman whined, reminding Rourke of a scolded dog. She hung her head and crawled forward a few feet on her hands and knees. Then she lifted a knee and let go with a loud fart, which she followed with maniacal laughter.
Rourke neither heard nor saw what happened next between the madwoman and the psychiatrist because a pulsating
circle of light at the cave’s doorway and its accompanying subterranean hum completely captured his attention. Immobilized by the sight, he could do nothing but gaze, slack-jawed, into the center of the glowing circle. The ordinary world of daylight outside the cave undulated like a sheer window curtain in a soft breeze, intimating a darker world behind its thinning veneer. He glimpsed—or thought he did—many sets of watchful eyes in the shadowy world. Animals’ eyes, he was sure. Then the center of the circle opened out into a widening vista of ancient ruins, stone columns and mausoleum-like structures overrun with leafless vines and odd tentacle-like creepers.
Rourke felt suddenly sick. Inner darkness crowded his vision and he was sure he was going to pass out. His ears rang. Something was pulling him out of himself, hollowing out his chest and draining his essence. He was all but certain that he was dying. He threw out a hand to brace himself on the wall of the cave but his hand went through the granite as if it were made of water, and he fell to his knees, caught in a whirlpool of physical sensations the human body was never meant to experience, nor designed to withstand.
That the world was not made of solid stuff somehow didn’t much surprise him. It seemed now that he’d always suspected as much, though he wasn’t the sort of man given to contemplating such abstract concepts. Solidity was illusion. The very stuff of reality was elusive. Illusory. Which probably went a long way in explaining how Rourke was sinking into the malleable stone floor of the cave.
“We have to go.” The voice came from very far away; its words held no meaning for Rourke as he slowly sank into layers of stone.
Something seized his shoulder and tugged at him.
“Come on, man! Get up!”
He looked up through the haze of porous rock and could just make out the flesh-knitted face of Trey Knott. Then Rourke was rising out of rock and stumbling to his feet, the stone floor of the cave solid beneath them.
“Did you see?” Rourke said, letting Knott lead him out of the cave.
The glowing circle was gone. The hum was still there, though it was very faint now. Rourke’s entire body was singing, vibrating at a frequency only he could hear.
“More than I wanted to see.”
Knott had Sarah Melton off her hands and knees and on a leash, muzzled. Rourke did a double-take and saw that the woman had a leather belt in her mouth, notched tightly behind her head, and that Knott was controlling her with it, directing her out of the cave as well. “I had to muzzle her,” he explained, “to keep her from biting me. I know how this looks but what else could I do?”
Rourke nodded, taking this in stride. What would’ve seemed shockingly extraordinary a couple of hours ago was now merely a matter of course. A naked woman on a leash made perfect sense, given the bizarre circumstance of this morning.
“Are you all right?” asked the doctor.
“I don’t know what all right is anymore,” Rourke honestly answered. “What the hell just happened here?”
If Knott had an answer, he kept it to himself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
* * *
Thorn had never shot and killed an animal larger than a rabbit, and that single experience had soured him on killing for sport and turned him against hunting altogether, so the proposition of shooting dogs was not a pleasant one—never mind that these mangy monsters crouched outside Widow Leatherwood’s house were the antithesis of Man’s Best Friend.
Shoot them he would, if he had to.
He drove up in front of the house and sat on the horn, giving the mutts a steady bleat he hoped their sensitive ears could not long tolerate. The dog on the front porch turned its head, cocked its ears and gave Thorn what he supposed was a look of irritation. The larger and more ferocious-looking mongrel got up from its post at the corner of the porch and came toward the Triumph with ears laid back and teeth bared in a slobbering snarl. The third dog at the other corner of the house didn’t so much as glance Thorn’s way, but maintained its low-bellied crouch and kept its gaze locked on the house.
Laying off the horn, Thorn picked up his .45, put the car in reverse and wheeled into a position that gave him a clear shot over the driver’sside door at the approaching hound. The fact that he hadn’t taken time to put the convertible’s top up meant that he couldn’t afford to miss what he was shooting at; with a muscular leap any one of the dogs could be on top of him and at his throat.
He sighted on the approaching dog’s black head at a spot midway between its close-set eyes. The dog was coming straight on and so unwittingly offered itself as a more or less fixed target. When the snarling mongrel was less than ten yards away Thorn fired. The dog’s head nodded once and then the beast lost its legs and went down in a dead heap of muscle and fur.
As Thorn lowered the pistol the other two dogs left their posts and charged the car, coming at him from two different directions. He snapped off a hurried shot at the one on the left and missed. He gunned the engine and the TR6 shot forward across the lawn and out of the dogs’ paths. He turned hard to the right and cut a wide circle, just missing a willow tree at the edge of the yard. There he braked, drew a bead on the nearest beast and fired. The .45 slug took the dog in the flank, spun the surprised mutt in a half-circle and deposited it in a mound of bloodied fur and exposed flesh and bone.
The last dog righted its charge and took a running jump at Thorn. In a panic he got off three rapid shots, the last hitting the airborne dog in the belly and knocking it off course. The dog banged headfirst into the driver’s door and dropped to the ground, yelping.
Thorn leaned over the door and finished the gut-shot mutt with a blast that blew apart the dog’s skull and spilled its brains on the grass.
Exhilarated by his four-wheel dogfight, Thorn drove a victory circle around the bodies of his canine enemies before parking in front of the house and jumping out to pound on the widow’s door.
“Not bad for a schoolteacher,” Mrs. Leatherwood said from behind the screen door. “Come on in, dogslayer. I have a lot to tell you and little time.”
When she opened the screen for him he saw the rifle hanging from her left hand. “My late husband’s twenty-two,” she said. “I had to shoot the door a few times to keep ’em from tearing it down and coming in after me.”
She stepped aside and he entered. She shut and bolted the door. She suddenly rounded on him and said, “Since you were here last I’ve gone deaf so don’t waste your time asking me questions. Just sit and listen to what I tell you and nod every now and then so I’ll know you understand.”
Thorn nodded. She led him down a creaky hallway and into a small parlor hung with dark floor-length curtains that looked as if they belonged in a larger, better-appointed room. One wall was taken up with unvarnished bookcases interspersed with paperbacks, hardbacks and a few spiral-bound recipe books. On one shelf books shared space with homey knick-knacks, copies of Reader’s Digest and small-framed photographs yellowed with age. The room smelled of musty books, fragrant lavender and mildew.
“Have a seat, professor,” she said, waving him to a loveseat with upholstery embroidered with red and pink roses. She collapsed heavily into a stuffed armchair and groaned. “Oh me.”
Thorn perched on the edge of the loveseat, eager to hear what she had to say. He had many questions he wanted to ask but didn’t because they would quite literally fall on deaf ears and go unanswered.
“Thank you for getting rid of them hellhounds,” she said with measured weariness. “The Dark Man of the Wood surely sent them to torment me.”
Good Lord, the old girl’s gone daft. And she looked as if she’d aged years since he last saw her.
She must’ve caught the alarm in his face because then she said, “Hear me out before you go to thinking I’m a crazy old bat.”
He dutifully nodded and leaned back in his seat. The excitement of the dust-up with the hounds of hell was already deserting him; in its place was a sharp pang of empathetic melancholy. Sitting in this sad room with this glum old woman was nearly more
than he could bear, suggesting as it did that he would similarly end his days as a lonely old man, all alone in an equally somber room. He quailed at the image of so bleak a future and averted his eyes.
Liza Leatherwood went on: “When I was a young girl my grandmother sat me down and told me about the Helling—the very thing you’ve been pestering me to tell you about. She swore me to secrecy and it pains me to have to break my vow now, but I’ve come to know something my granny didn’t. It would be sinful if I was to keep it to myself, sure enough. Which is why I have to tell it to you. But before I do, you have to promise me one thing. You have to swear to me that you’ll cut down a tree and remove the stump. Tear it up by the roots. You understand?”
“Yes, no, I mean—”
“Say it,” she said with a fierce look. “Swear you’ll get rid of that tree.”
“I don’t understand. What’s a tree has to—”
“Are you deaf? I told you I can’t hear worth a damn. Now raise your right hand and get ready to swear you’ll get rid of the tree.”
She got up, walked stiffly across the room and held a Bible in front of him. Thorn hadn’t noticed the Bible until now; it seemed to have appeared as if by magic.
“Put your left hand on the Good Book,” she instructed, “and swear it.”
He put his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand and said, “I swear I will get rid of the tree.”
She nodded, her face losing some of its tension.
Outside a crow cawed bitterly, as if protesting Thorn’s vow to fell a tree.
“I don’t expect you to do the cutting yourself,” she said. “Better to hire it done. I ’spect you’ll find a tree-removal outfit in the phone book. But you have to be there to make sure it’s done proper. Nod to show you understand.”
Thorn nodded, wondering how much he would have to go out of pocket in keeping his odd vow.
Daemon of the Dark Wood Page 21