The woman returned to her chair and to her story. “Here’s the thing, professor. There really is a Dark Man of the Wood, just like Hawthorne wrote about. Only worse. The one hereabouts is more demon than man. I don’t know if it’s the same one Mr. Hawthorne told of. More likely there’s more than one of ’em in the world. This one showed up in these hills back in eighteen-sixty-five. Far as anybody knows, that was the first time. Those that saw it—or remembered seeing it years later—said it was part goat, part man, with horns and cloven hooves like the Devil. Maybe it was the Devil. It sure enough brought a heap of evil when it came.”
Thorn opened his mouth to speak but she shushed him with a wave of her hand and a stern look. “According to my granny, it cast a spell on the womenfolk of what’s now Widow’s Ridge with its ungodly cry. It called ’em out and they had no choice but to go to him. Evidently, its cry clouded men’s minds too, ’cause most of ’em didn’t do anything to stop their women. In most cases though, it was sly enough to call the women when the men weren’t about.
“What happened when they went to him, my granny didn’t know. She said that most of the women either couldn’t remember or were too ashamed to say what it did to ’em. But whatever it was, it was most unnatural—if you catch my drift. However the demon did it, it turned the women into raving killers. They lured the menfolk into the woods for some sort of orgy and slaughtered every one of them in some sick ceremony to honor the goat-man. Granny hinted that some of the women turned cannibal and actually ate parts of the men. When it was all over, the women returned to their homes like nothing had happened—or like they’d all had the same bad dream.
“When folks in Dogwood got wind of it, they went looking in the woods and found the remains of the murdered men. Nobody could figure out exactly what had happened or who’d done the butchering, so they ended up burying the body parts they found in a common grave about two miles from where we sit. A circuit-riding preacher said a few words, and not long after, somebody decided to plant an oak tree on the gravesite as a kind of memorial. Because they never found all the body parts or any of the heads, nor knew for sure who they’d buried there, they didn’t put up grave markers.”
“That’s the tree you want me to remove! The one on the gravesite.”
She silenced him with a scalding look. Then she continued her tale. “Folks took to calling our little settlement Widow’s Ridge, and rather than pass on the story of the shameful slaughter to the next generation, the women concocted the story that all the murdered menfolk had been killed in the Civil War, hence the name Widow’s Ridge. Folks in these parts went along with the fiction, I guess, because they preferred it to the truth. Nobody wanted to think about what might’ve transpired out in those woods. Made ’em too uneasy, I reckon. Better to think of the dead men as war heroes. A dozen men, all told.”
She paused to stare off into the dim room and to pick a speck of lint from her dress. Then she continued. “Three nights ago—or was it four? I’ve been so out of sorts here lately, I can’t be sure—he came back. The goat-man. I heard its cry. It was just the way my granny said it would be. She warned me that it would come back someday and that I would know its shrill cry when I heard it. I knew it for what it was, all right. It was like nothing I’d ever heard in all my long years. If I hadn’t already been deaf in one ear I’m sure I woulda gone out to meet him. Most women can’t resist the call. Very young children and the mentally afflicted can, but not without going some kind of crazy—or so my grandmother said, and I reckon it’s true. Anyway, hearing that cry scared me so bad I took a hatpin and punched a hole in the eardrum of my good ear so if I heard it again I wouldn’t go crazy.
“So he’s come back and he’s gathering a new band of women to do his murderous work. But here’s the thing, professor. I know how to stop him. I won’t bother to tell you how I know ’cause you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. That tree you’re gonna cut down? It’s haunted by the souls of the men that were killed more’n a hundred years ago. That oak tree’s been their prison for all those years. When you have it cut down and the roots pulled up, their spirits will be released and then in their pent-up rage they can drive off the demon. Before you ask how I know this, I know because I saw it. Vengeful spirits are powerful like nothing else on this earth.”
She paused long enough to give Thorn an appraising stare. He tried to keep the incredulity he felt from his face because he didn’t want to upset the old woman further. From her haggard appearance, he didn’t think she could take much more adversity.
She said, “You don’t believe it. Well, that’s fine. You don’t have to, so long as you keep your promise and take down that tree.”
“I will keep my promise,” he said, speaking slowly so that she might read the words on his lips.
“Oh, I know it’s hard to believe,” she allowed. “Over the years I doubted it myself. I knew my grandmother believed it with all her heart and soul, but the one thing that didn’t make sense to me was: Why here? Out of the whole world, why would the demon pick these hills to do his mischief?”
Thorn nodded. He was wondering the same thing. Even if you could accept the rest of it, that was the one question that weakened the whole argument. Why here?
“Well, I studied on that a lot, down the years,” she said in a tone Thorn could only think of as professorial, “and I’ve yet to come up with a good answer. Some folks say there was a witch lived hereabouts back before the Civil War and that she had truck with the spirit world, household gods, demons and such.” She shrugged. “I never met a witch so I don’t have an opinion on that. Asa Edgar’s momma was a healer with some strange ways and notions but she wasn’t what I’d call a witch. More likely, there’s something about the land itself that invites the demon or makes it easy for him to come into our world. I’ve read something about ‘ley lines’ and how they have strong magnetic energy that makes them places of power, and I think something like that would be the more likely answer. But who knows? All I know for sure, the creature is real and he’s come again.”
Thorn had first heard of the mystical powers of ley lines from his students and had subsequently researched the subject just enough to satisfy himself that it was nothing more than a brew of New Age fantasies, shaken not stirred with a jigger of science.
“Remove that tree and you’ll find your bones under it,” she said. “You need to do it today, professor. Yesterday woulda been better.”
He nodded.
“And take your gun with you. You’ll probably have to shoot some more evil curs, of one sort or another. The goat-man won’t leave without a hard fight.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
* * *
Sharyn sat on the edge of her hospital bed and hugged her knees tightly to her chest as if to contain her humiliation, but of course she couldn’t. The nursing staff had caught her acting out her bizarre sexual fantasy—she hoped it was fantasy, rather than something more disturbing—and now, half an hour later, a shameful blush still burned her face like a blistering tattoo.
She harbored no illusions about her sexual orientation; she was undeniably bisexual. She came down (and came) in both gender camps. Much the same as her psyche vacillated between mania and depression, her sexual desires vibrated along a continuum between male and female, and on the whole, she found the overall symmetry satisfying. She didn’t consider it in any way abnormal, and she had little patience with those pompous self-appointed guardians of morality who saw homosexuality as a sinful aberration. She was the way she was because of her genetic makeup and none but the grossly ignorant could believe there was such a thing as a sinful gene. Had genetics played no part in the matter, she thought she would’ve chosen of her own free will to “go both ways,” rather than to limit herself to a solitary sex.
The shame she now felt was due to her lack of control in the presence of Susan Knott. It had to have appeared to the nursing staff that Sharyn had taken advantage of a seriously disturbed patient—and maybe she had. But no, that
wouldn’t wash, because Susan Knott had been the instigator, or more accurately, the catalyst.
But that wasn’t right either.
Sharyn knew that the true catalyst was the Dionysian entity that had set this whole bizarre business in motion, and was even now exerting its insidious influence. It wasn’t fantasy. It wasn’t delusion. It was reality.
Hyper-reality.
And she hadn’t been strong enough to resist it. That was the real source of her shame. She should’ve recognized that she was being manipulated from beyond and should’ve gotten the hell away from that woman before …
“But I wanted it to happen,” she said aloud. “I knew exactly what was happening and I didn’t care.”
She shook her head violently. Then she pounded her fists on her knees. “Damn you,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure if she was damning herself or someone else.
She clamped her eyes shut and rested her forehead on her knees. Unfamiliar emotions welled up within her, and she was overcome with a strong sense of dislocation. Without actually moving, she felt herself transported to some other place and time. The cramped little hospital room was a cave. The cave was embedded in an ancient woodland. Mythical creatures skulked with nefarious purpose about the shadowy landscape. Dark energies of lust and baser urges charged the rarefied air; Sharyn’s inner sea of stormy emotions swelled sympathetically, and she could do nothing but wait for the brutal waves to break on the eroding shore of her sanity.
* * * *
After they’d seen Sarah Melton secured in the back of the ambulance, Knott and Rourke waited for the coroner to arrive. Forty-five minutes later, Rourke was driving Knott back to the medical center to pick up his car. The cell phone’s sober ring-tone broke the uneasy silence.
Knott flipped open his cell and answered the call. Though he had come to rely heavily on the high-tech gadget in recent years, he’d always felt fumble-fingered when opening the little thing with his big hands and had on more than one occasion dropped it in the process. He didn’t drop it this time. He fingered the correct little square on the pad and answered: “This is Dr. Knott.”
The dayshift charge nurse told him that there had been “an incident” with Mrs. Knott, and then went on to describe in clinical detail Susan’s inappropriate physical contact with another female patient, Sharyn Rampling.
When he’d heard enough of it, Knott interrupted the nurse and told her he would get to the hospital as soon as possible. He angrily tapped the END button and broke communication.
He glanced over at Rourke, who sat wearily behind the steering wheel, staring at the road ahead as if lost in thought. Knott was relieved that the deputy gave no sign that he’d overheard any of the nurse’s side of the conversation.
Though it went against his psychiatric training, Knott was nevertheless deeply ashamed of his wife. When dealing with his patients, he assiduously guarded against making moral judgments, but this was his wife, for God’s sake! He winced when he realized the extent of his anger with her, and then he was ashamed of himself. Susan was in no way to blame for her behavior, he knew. Unnatural forces were at work here. He’d directly felt their effects up on the mountain, so how could he hold his wife accountable for her aberrant behavior when he knew that something very powerful was pulling psychic strings and orchestrating the vilest of acts and most absurd follies? He could not.
His mind’s fresh images of what had happened to the search party offered further evidence of diabolical influence. The whole scene might’ve been comical if it hadn’t been so deadly. Seeing a group of manly men in the throes of homosexual panic wasn’t an everyday sight, to be sure. His own state of arousal on the mountainside had been unlike anything he’d ever experienced, and he’d hated feeling that he was not completely in control of his faculties. Still, he’d fared better than some of the other men, and he supposed that was a function of his willpower and his training to remain detached in the face of madness.
He glanced again at Rourke’s grim countenance. “Are you all right?” he asked the deputy.
“I would be if I could get these damn pictures out of my head. You saw the same shit I did. How do you deal with that? You got any professional secrets for that sort of thing, Doc?”
Knott did a quick mental run-through of appropriate responses but all he could say was, “No.”
Rourke’s knuckles blanched as he tightened his grip on the wheel. Then he said, “Sarah Melton … Think she’ll ever be the same?”
“Like she was before all this happened to her? Impossible to say, at this point. I don’t know how much she’ll remember when she comes out of her dissociative state.”
“If she comes out of it.”
Knott waited a beat, then he said, “There’s a complication in my wife’s condition that doesn’t bode well for any of those exposed to … this thing. That was the hospital that called a few minutes ago. The staff caught my wife sexually acting out with another female patient. She’s not … she’s never been anything but a straight-laced heterosexual. How can one’s sexual persuasion change overnight?”
“So … those guys on the mountain could be affected the same way? We could be? Long-term?”
“I don’t know. We just don’t know what we’re dealing with. What this thing really is.”
“Yeah. Well, whatever it is, I have to catch it. And kill it. And you have to do what you can to clean up the mental mess it’s made.”
“Want to switch jobs?” Knott asked in an attempt to lighten the mood.
“No way, Doc. I’ll leave the head-cleaning to you. All I want is one clean shot.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
* * *
Thorn found the Tip Top Tree Service in the yellow pages and made the call. A man named Carl explained that he could fell the tree with a chainsaw and use a stump grinder to shred the stump in a matter of minutes.
“I’ll pay you a hundred dollars extra to do it today,” Thorn said.
Carl said he reckoned he could get to it before dark, no problem.
Thorn gave him directions to Mrs. Leatherwood’s house and Carl agreed to meet him there at three o’clock. That would give him time to recruit the students he needed for the dig. He spent the rest of the morning calling his students and getting tools and the necessary equipment together. If there were indeed human remains buried beneath the tree, he would then notify the authorities. He didn’t anticipate a legal problem with an archeological dig, but it was wise practice to cover his bases.
He called the cell phones of six students who would be eager to assist him with the dig but he was unable to reach one of them. That was okay. Five would do.
He made notes on Liza Leatherwood’s incredible tale, writing it up without making any judgment of its veracity. The main thing now was uncovering the remains. With any luck, the bones would speak for themselves.
* * * *
Rourke dropped Knott off at his car in the Medical Center’s parking lot. “I hope your wife gets better,” he said. Before she gets worse, he thought to himself.
He was too tired to think his way through to his next move. He needed sleep, at least a couple of hours to belay his physical and emotional exhaustion. He was in no condition to tackle the official paperwork for which he was responsible. How the hell was he going to write up what had happened to the search party without sounding like a raving psycho? A few hours of sleep should clear his mind, but he was in charge now. His fellow deputies would be looking to him for leadership. Sleep was out of the question.
He drove back to the Sheriff’s Office, wondering how he could get the other lost women away from a thing with apparent supernatural powers—and how he could prevent other women from being taken.
* * * *
Jude—the former Judy Lynn Bowen—was sleeping in her dead lover’s blood when the god called her out. Sated in every possible way and drunk on dreams of glorious debauchery, she came to crystal-clear consciousness immediately, rose from the basement floor, and went outside to a
nswer the divine summons. She didn’t fret that she was stark naked and covered in blood. She was beyond such concerns. She wasn’t worried that neighbors might see her walking from the back door to the woods. Her god—her bestial bridegroom—was awesomely capable of handling such incidentals.
The morning light hurt her eyes and she was glad when she stepped into the shadows of the woods to drink the darkness down. Her body quivered pleasurably in anticipation of being once again in his presence.
A short distance into the trees, she paused, unsure of which way to go. He called again. A short high-pitched whistling shriek only she and the neighborhood dogs could hear. She went toward the sound, eager and unbearably excited.
A small band of women waited beneath a willow. They were naked except for leafy vines tied around their waists and laurel makeshift wreaths on their heads. Some of them held walking sticks, and two of them were armed with club-like tree branches. A tall woman with unusually long breasts held a machete in her left hand and a laurel branch in her right. Most of their faces were familiar to Jude, but like her, they had sloughed off their dull identities in order to serve him.
A knot of jealously twisted in Jude’s belly and rage suddenly seethed just beneath her outward calm. She did not wish to share her god with these women. They were not as worthy as she. Had they killed for him? Had they given up everything to serve him? Were they all to be his brides? No! She would fight them to the death, if she had to. She was the chosen one, the youngest, the prettiest, surely the most desirable.
She stood still and worked out in her mind how she might take the machete from the bitch with the long tits and show them all that she was the special one. And the toughest.
But then a woman with long red hair stepped forward, placed a laurel wreath on Jude’s head and kissed her full on the mouth, slipping her tongue past Jude’s lips. The other six women surrounded her and closed on her in a bizarre group hug. Jude’s jealously and rage drained away, replaced by an intense feeling of peaceful well-being. Feminine hands groped her, caressing her breasts and slipping past the lips of her sex. Some of them licked Josh’s blood from her skin while others chewed her blood-matted hair. She shut her eyes and yielded to their kittenish ministrations.
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