Daemon of the Dark Wood

by Randy Chandler

  The other women came straggling in, huffing and puffing with exertion. They were such a ragged-looking band that Jude was suddenly ashamed of them. But then as they dropped one by one to their knees at the foot of the stump and held up their offerings, she knew it was all right, that he would accept their worship and what they offered.

  With a flourish of his hand, he gave them to understand that they were to place the offered heads on the stump by his feet. This they did, so that he was soon encircled by the unsightly assortment of dead men’s heads.

  He began to sing. His song was not shrill like his summoning cry but was softly melodic, middle-pitched and piping, seeming to harmonize with the birds’ singing as smoothly as it did with the percussive cawing of nearby crows.

  Then he began to dance, hooves clopping the wooden pedestal without breaking the circle of severed heads. As he danced and sang, his purplish penis hardened and rose to shocking proportion, and Jude was reminded of a snake charmer enticing a serpent to rise and undulate to his piped rhythms. His terrifying cock bobbed heavily between his furry loins. Jude’s breath caught in her throat.

  He danced. The women stared, entranced. Jude’s hips began to move with his rhythm. Before her eyes, the goatish god grew more distinct, increasingly vivid as if he were finally coming fully into this world so that he might lord over it as its intended master.

  Jude knew what was coming next. He would dance himself into a frenzy of lust and would ravage her and her sister-brides. It wouldn’t be like before. This time it would be totally physical, not like being fucked by a misty ghost but by an in-the-flesh man-beast. His magic wand of a cock would wash away her worldly sins, transform her, turn her into a goddess.

  She was going wet between her legs. Her nipples hardened and yearned for his rough touch. She knew his singing and his clopping jig were having the same effect on the other women, but she was determined to be the first one fucked. She deserved as much. She’d earned it, hadn’t she? She’d given up so much! Gave up her life, her lover. And she was the youngest of all the women, the one with the most life to give up. He had to take her first, to honor her sacrifice and her youth.

  Then an ugly sound intruded and wrecked everything. It came from another part of the woods, distant but close enough to sour his magical song. Jude knew what was making that awful blat and whine: a chainsaw. Some redneck son of a bitch was violating the hallowed wood. Ruining the sacred ceremony!

  The effect on the man-beast was immediate. His face turned ferocious. His eyes blazed with wrath. His dance turned violent. His hooves struck harder, faster. And then he crushed the skulls encircling his feet, stomped them one by one until all the heads resembled lumpy pancakes, covered with hair and vile ooze. He suddenly stopped dancing, opened his mouth impossibly wide and loosed a shriek so shrill and terrible that it nearly made Jude lose control of her bowels.

  She knew right away that it was a call to arms and a declaration of war. She and her sister-brides seized their weapons and raised them to the thundering sky. The man-beast leapt down from his pedestal and started running toward the sound of the chainsaw.

  Jude and the others ran after as their beloved goat-man led them into battle.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  * * *

  Julie wasn’t used to so much physical exertion. Though she possessed a slender frame, her sedentary vocation as writer had in no way prepared her for jogging cross-country through hilly landscapes of thick woods. Running naked with the knife, she felt somehow as if she were playing a role in an archetypal fairy tale. In fact, an old nursery rhyme tune was looping through her head: See how they run, see how they run/They all ran after the farmer’s wife/Who cut off their tails with a carving knife …

  She added her own spin: Cut off their heads with a carving knife. Cut off their heads …

  She stopped a moment to catch her breath, bent over with her hands on her knees, her breasts pendulously hanging, heaving, aching. Then she was running again, going toward the caller, though the call had been too far away to hear with her ears, she’d heard it with her spirit’s ears. And with her blood.

  Thunder crashed all around her. Raindrops pattered on a carpet of dead leaves and pine straw. She became aware that someone was following her. Chasing her? Chastening her? Calling her off?

  Michael?

  Never mind Michael, she told herself. Too late for that—for the guardianship of angels. He’d had his chance and he’d let her down, left her in a lonely lurch. She’d been called by one more powerful, called upon to abandon the horrors of imagination, to leave behind the tired tropes and trappings of bookish horror. Now was the time to plunge your hands into the blood and guts of real life, plunge up to the elbows into bowels of reality, dive whole-heartedly into the bleeding thick of it, for once and for all, and most especially for the sake of the Dark One calling you on.

  Julie Archer was running to meet her destiny. Buoyed by this knowledge, she ran faster, and the pain of exertion sloughed off and fell by the wooded wayside, left behind like her old identity and her misguided stabs at life.

  * * * *

  Rourke watched as Thorn worked to complete the job begun by the dead tree man. From the assured way the professor handled the chainsaw, Rourke knew the man must’ve felled a few trees in his time.

  A tug at his sleeve. Rourke turned. Mrs. Leatherwood was beside him, pulling him toward her lips. Just for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him, but then she was shouting into his ear: “You’ve got to get rid of the stump too!”

  He nodded. He believed her. Believed she knew exactly what she was talking about. Thorn would have the tree ready to fall in minutes, and Rourke wasted no time in getting the motor-operated stump grinder off the little trailer behind the Tip Top Tree Service’s truck and ready for action. He had never operated a grinder but he’d seen them in operation and knew he could do a serviceable job with it. He started the grinder’s motor and stood ready. It was a boxy robotic-looking piece of equipment on squat wheels. It stood waist-high and possessed a blade-like disk with teeth designed to eat up a stump and turn wood quickly into mulch.

  Through the noise of the grinder’s motor and the chainsaw’s whine, Rourke thought he heard the same beastly cry that had set off the animal attacks on the search party. But no, he couldn’t have heard any such thing amid this machine-made clamor. And even if he had, it wouldn’t matter. He and Thorn had their respective jobs to do and accomplishing them was their best defense, according to Old Lady Leatherwood. She believed this with such intensity that he made her beliefs his own. Having seen the beast—the rain-thing—with his own eyes, it wasn’t difficult to believe. He had failed to defeat the creature with the ordinary means at his disposal. Extraordinary means were all that was left to him now. They had to work.

  Thorn glanced up from his work and gave Rourke a nod, signaling that the next go with the chainsaw would bring the tree down. No more than five yards away from the tree, Rourke nodded back, his hands on the controls of the humming stump grinder.

  Dave Sikes leaned against his van, smoking a cigarette as he watched over the dead man while waiting for the ambulance to arrive and remove the corpse from the scene. The shaken young man who had come along to help the professor with his initial dig finally emerged from the Toyota pickup and was keeping a wary distance from the hulking bear’s carcass. He announced that he was going to drive to the hospital to see how his injured friend was faring, then he got back in the truck and drove off. Mrs. Leatherwood was leaning against the front of Thorn’s sports car, arms folded across her chest, chin jutting with the unmistakable authority of an old-timey schoolmarm.

  As Thorn began his final cut, a band of bare-breasted women armed with primitive implements came screaming out of the woods, running straight at the man with the chainsaw.

  “Jesus Christ,” Rourke said, not knowing whether he’d just uttered a prayer or a blasphemous curse.

  * * * *

  “He needs us,” Susan Knott said a
s she wiped blood from her mouth and chin with the back of her hand.

  Sharyn Rampling looked at the dead doctor on the floor and knew he no longer needed anything.

  “We have to go to him,” Susan said with pressured speech.

  Sharyn understood then. Susan was talking about him. Pan. Dionysus, or whatever name the ancient entity might go by now in this modern world. Not that he needed a name. He was beyond naming. Her thoughts were racing so fast it was hard to stay with the slowly unfolding events. Was she drunk on the dead man’s blood? Drunk on feminine power in service to a masculine god? What was this aching emptiness she felt in her chest. Was it remorse at having had a hand in the doctor’s death?

  Susan bent down and dug keys from her husband’s pocket. “We’ll take his car. It’s fast. A Jag. We have to hurry. Don’t you feel it? He needs us.”

  “We’re locked in,” Sharyn reminded her blood sister.

  Susan smiled. “We’re stronger than they are. We’ll kill our way out if we have to. Ready?”

  Sharyn nodded. She was ready. With the taste of one kill still on her tongue, she realized that her aching emptiness was actually hunger for more mayhem. She hadn’t struck the killing blows but she was nonetheless complicit in the gory deed.

  * * * *

  Wearing the dead man’s protective goggles, Alfred Thorn caught movement out of the corner of his eye as the chainsaw’s teeth tore into the tree on the side opposite the gaping wedge sawn in the trunk. The tree listed toward the vacant wedge and Thorn peered through the smudged, sweat-rimmed goggles to see a handful of naked and semi-naked women running toward him.

  He pulled back the chainsaw and straightened up to face the female chargers.

  My God! Maenads! It’s all true! Sharyn was right!

  He understood in a flash that they intended to stop him from felling the tree. The old woman had been right too, in her assertion that someone or something would go to any length to try to protect the tree’s integrity. And here they came, armed and wild, bearing down on him. Was that war-paint streaking their skin? No, it was blood!

  All right, Alfred old boy, this is life or death. Defend yourself!

  There came a moment of indecision wherein he couldn’t decide if he should drop the chainsaw and draw his pistol or use the saw to fend off his attackers. In the end, he chose to stay with the chainsaw because he doubted that he would be able to actually shoot a woman. With the saw he might be able to keep them at bay or scare them off. Even a wild woman would have to think twice before running into the dangerous teeth of a chainsaw. He held it up in a threatening gesture, absurdly reminding himself of the murderous “Leatherface” in that Texas Chainsaw movie he’d seen back in the seventies.

  But the women did not slow their charge. There were six, no, seven of them and they all were about to converge on him. He bent his knees a bit and went into a crouch with his whirring weapon held high in front of him. He decided to use the saw only defensively; if a woman ran into its teeth, it would be her own fault, not his.

  When the closest woman was no more than ten feet from him with a machete raised over her head and her face twisted into a mask of pure rage, a gunshot popped off and she went down. She slid headlong at his feet, forsaking her machete and grabbing her thigh, screaming.

  Thank God the cop had no compunction about picking off attackers with well-place non-lethal shots. After all, these women weren’t in their right minds, weren’t responsible for their reprehensible actions.

  Distracted by a redhead with a sling blade, Thorn didn’t realize how close the woman with the pickax was until she swung it at his head. He reacted on reflex and tried to parry the blow with the chainsaw. The saw’s spinning belt of teeth sliced into her thin wrist and took off her hand, and the pickax struck Thorn’s left shoulder a glancing blow.

  More gunshots sounded above the chainsaw’s whine. And then came a loud cracking noise as the tree began to fall on its own, toppling toward the ground in maddeningly slow motion.

  A boom of thunder unleashed a sudden heavy downpour of rain.

  A heavyset woman bringing up the rear of the disorganized formation of women froze, looked up at the tree coming down on her and then tried to scamper out of the falling timber’s path, but she was too fat and sluggish, and the tree crushed her into the earth, its leafless limbs snapping hollowly and gouging the ground.

  Thorn saw the ax blade as a gunmetal blur just before it chopped into his right shoulder, the shocking force of the blow knocking the chainsaw out of his hands and him to the ground. The chainsaw’s motor sputtered and died. Gritting his teeth at the excruciating pain, he looked up at the ax-wielding young woman and saw her cock the ax over her shoulder for another blow.

  His last thought before the ax fell: This is it, I’m dead.

  * * * *

  When the tree hit the earth with a ground-shaking thud, Jude felt the volcanic fury of her master mounting toward eruption. Though he was well behind her, concealed by woods, she could feel how incensed he was that she and her sister-brides had failed him, and his fury fed her own frenzy. Her first ax-blow had knocked the chainsaw man down and bloodied his shoulder. Now she would have off his head with a vengeful strike.

  She cocked the ax over her shoulder and swung it with all her might.

  But something went very wrong. Something hit her chest with the force of a mule’s kick, taking her breath away and knocking her backward as the ax flew from her hands. She staggered to stay on her feet. She looked down and saw the hole in her chest, just above her left tit.

  I’m shot, she thought as the rainy world dimmed and her ears began to ring. She tried to catch her breath but couldn’t. Her knees buckled. Her bestial rage drained away as if farting and spewing from the bullet-hole in her chest.

  Then she was on the ground, tasting the earth. The rain was cool and almost soothing.

  Cleansing.

  This wasn’t happening to her.

  This was happening to a stranger.

  This isn’t me.

  I’m Judy Lynn Bowen.

  Judy Lynn.

  Judy …

  * * * *

  Rourke recognized Judy Lynn Bowen just before he squeezed the trigger. Had he hesitated in that flash of recognition? Probably. But it didn’t matter. That dangerous thing he’d glimpsed in her eyes when he spoke with her in the hospital had surfaced to take control of her. He’d had to shoot her to save Thorn’s life. Deadly force had been necessary. A clean shoot, any way you looked at it.

  Now that Thorn was down, the remaining women turned their murderous attention on Rourke. They advanced in a strung-out line, brandishing their crude weapons.

  “Stop!” Rourke shouted. “I will shoot you.”

  They didn’t heed his warning. They stalked forward.

  Behind the women something big and shadowy emerged from the tree line. Rourke knew at once what it was.

  The rain-thing.

  But this time it was more than an invisible-man outline in the downpour. Now it was solid and very much in this world.

  And it was coming at him in a weird gallop that chilled Rourke’s blood and made him want to turn and run.

  * * * *

  Liza Leatherwood saw the dreaded beast come out of the trees, and her bladder let go with a dribble of pee. She’d watched in horror as the helling women tried their damnedest to stop the felling of the spirit-haunted tree. When the tree finally fell, relief washed over her, and she thought she could hear the spirits’ angry voices above the low rumble of the stump grinder’s motor. But the stump remained, the tree still attached to it by a tough skin of bark.

  And now the beast of many a nightmare was here. Just as foretold. Here to fight for a foothold in this world. To have his way with frail humanity.

  The deputy had his hands full with the mad hellers. That coroner feller had jumped into his van and driven away, the coward. It was up to her to finish the job.

  Help me, Wilbur, she pleaded as she moved toward the chain
saw. She moved more sprightly than she’d moved in years. The rain fogged her bifocals and made everything look as if it were inside a melting cube of ice, but she could see the chainsaw well enough. “Give me strength, Lord,” she said as she bent down and picked it up. It was heavier than it looked and the handle was slippery due to the rain, but she was determined to do what had to be done. She yanked the starter cord. The saw sputtered but didn’t start.

  The deputy fired two, three more times, but Liza kept her attention on her task. She yanked the cord again. This time the motor started and the vibration shook her arthritic bones something fierce. She pulled the trigger and the belt of saw-teeth cycled round the metal blade.

  Then she bent low, ignoring the pain in her lower back, and guided the blade into the V-shaped swath of tree bark. Sawdust flew into the rain.

  Please, Lord, help me do this.

  Then the saw cut through and the tree rolled free of the stump.

  She dropped the chainsaw in the mud. She looked up to see the half-man/half-beast knock the deputy to the ground with a powerful sweep of its muscular arm.

  The beast glared at her with its goatish face. It gave an angry shriek and danced toward her on hellish hooves.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  * * *

  Sharyn followed Susan Knott down the semi-dark corridor toward the nursing station. The thunderstorm had knocked the power out and the emergency generator had kicked on to power a meager allotment of lights. A staff member was passing out supper trays from the food cart but took no notice of the two women striding with dark purpose toward their freedom. Susan was still in her bloody hospital gown, held together by three ties on the back and flapping open to reveal that she wore no panties. Sharyn admired her shapely ass and wondered if the woman worked out to maintain her pleasing physique. This was just one of many thoughts racing through her head with dizzying speed.